Resistance is futile. Incentives are fruitful.

Writing in 2019, Roy Scranton reviews books by Bill McKibben and David Wallace-Wells:

And at this point — after the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the “largest anti-war rally in history,” which saw millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world protesting the American invasion of Iraq and which utterly failed to stop the war — after the “People’s Climate March” in 2014, the “largest climate change march in history,” which utterly failed to have any noticeable effect on global climate policy — after decades of failed protests against institutional racism, gun violence, sexism, nuclear weapons, abortion, war, environmental degradation, and a raft of other issues — only the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking. In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into the same vague preaching as does Wallace-Wells’s. Human beings are special, McKibben insists, because we have free will: “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.” Asking hard questions about who that “we” is, how “we” make decisions, how power works, and the limits of human freedom are beyond the reach of both writers, because such questions lie outside the narrative they’re both trapped in. No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”, 'Los Angeles Review of Books', 3 June 2079

One thing we can take away from this is that sufficiently large financial incentives can outweigh the informed wishes and protests of millions of ordinary people. Dr Scranton is writing about climate change, but the same applies to any of a multitude of other threats to our well-being and even our existence. The incentives take the form not only of profits to large corporations but of salaries to hard-working employees of conventional organisations ostensibly devoted to improving the environment and society's welfare. My thoughts about such organisations are here, but we have only to look at the state of the planet's human, animal and plant life to realise how little they are actually achieving. I do not see any of this changing, which is why I advocate Social Policy Bonds, which will encourage the formation of a new type of organisation, whose every activity will be aimed at achieving society's goals most efficiently. 

The predicament that we're in results from incentives that are mis-aligned, in that they favour existing wealthy corporations and existing bodies, be they public- or private sector, all of whose interests differ from and, indeed, are often in conflict with the long-term interests of everyone including, I believe, the individual members of these bodies themselves. The 'we' to which Dr Scranton refers does, I believe, refer to all rational beings, despite their working in a system that is at odds with their real needs and wishes. Given that large-scale protests are ineffectual, the most effective way of re-orienting society such that we give a higher priority to solving our with social and environmental problems would be to re-jig the incentives. Social Policy Bonds would do that. They would start out by defining exactly those goals we want to achieve in terms of verifiable outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people, who could therefore participate in their selection and relative priority. These goals would not presuppose who will achieve them and how they will be achieved. So, we could target so-called 'intractable' goals, such as the ending of war. Or, once we have defined exactly which climate goals we want to see, we could target a combination of indicators of the climate and its impact on plant, animal and human life, and issue bonds that would supply incentives for people to solve the climate change problem. (See here or search this blog for my work on climate change.) 

There are various possible problems arising from the implementation of a Social Policy Bond regime, which I've tried to address here. No question: the bonds are not a panacea and will need trials, experimentation and refinement. I advocate them because (1) Our current trajectory means we are collectively facing urgent, huge crises: social, environmental, nuclear..., and (2) I think Social Policy Bonds, with their combination of clear, meaningful outcomes and market efficiencies are the best option.