One of the advantages of a Social Policy Bond regime is that it would oblige democratic governments to do what they do well: articulate society's wishes and raise the revenue to fund their achievement. Sadly, much of the choosing and prioritising of society's goals has shifted from our elected representatives to bureaucracy:
Bureaucrats no longer saw their role as “looking for methods to fulfill responsibilities defined by the public through politics,” wrote University of Chicago historian Barry Karl in a 1976 essay, but rather as “fulfilling the demands of interests defined by their own growing expertise.” ...The “public good” is now explicitly defined by the bureaucracy, not elected leaders. Defending democracy means defending the right of bureaucrats to ignore elected leaders. Denizens of the Deep State, Bruce Gilley, 'The American Mind', 26 February 2025
Reasons why this shift occurred are not hard to find: politicians have to react, and be seen to react, to daily events. With frequent opinion polls, their time horizons are even shorter than the period between elections. Bureaucracy is more permanent. So we have the 'deep state', whose over-riding interest, as with all institutions, is self-perpetuation. Its goals are formulated, explicitly or not, without reference to - and perhaps in conflict with - public opinion.
A Social Policy Bond regime would be different. It would take as its starting point those social and environmental goals that are of interest to a country's citizens. These goals would be long term in nature and meaningful to ordinary people, who could therefore participate in their selection and prioritising. As a result, we'd have greater public buy-in. That's in stark contrast to today's policymaking systems, in which debate centres around the supposed means of achieving unarticulated or vague goals rather than the goals themselves. By default, then, decisions as to what society wants and where it's going are made by bureaucrats. It's not healthy.
