Going beyond root causes

One strength of the Social Policy Bond idea is that it doesn't try to, nor need to identify relationships between cause and effect, between policy and outcome. It's not always efficient necessary to look for root causes. Indeed the perceived need to look for them can be an excuse to delay or ignore the social problem. Take war: it can have multiple causes, ranging from the childhood experiences of political leaders to ethnic rivalry, or the real or imagined need of a country for more resources, the insecurities of military commanders....

Rather than seek to identify, weight and address any of its myriad possible causes, a Social Policy Bond regime would instead target war itself. Holders of World Peace Bonds could choose to look for root causes, but only if they think that approach is worthwhile compared to alternatives. When the goal is peace sustained for, say, four decades, then alternative approaches could include: making the educational materials of schoolchildren less belligerent; encouraging student exchanges; influencing media outlets to tone down inflammatory propaganda; distracting, deposing or otherwise undermining leaders who foment violence and hatred. 

Policymakers, if they choose to, can do a good job of solving simple social and environmental problems, whose causes are obvious. But our complex society, with its multitude of variables, feedback loops and time lags makes it difficult for any single, conventional organisation - even ones as powerful as national governments - to deal with problems such as war, violence, crime, air pollution or poverty. Even if the causes of these problems were unchanging and invariate over geographic region, such a task would be difficult and contentious. But they aren't static nor uniform: they change over time and vary from one locality to the next. We need diverse, adaptive approaches, that no single conventional organisation, however rich and powerful, can possibly address: such organisations and the people working for them have their own agendas which often deviate from, or even conflict with, their ostensible goals.

Social Policy Bonds would lead to the creation of a new sort of organisation: ones whose sole remit is to solve targeted problems as efficiently as possible, and whose every activity would be in the service of society's targeted goal. Having a protean structure and composition, it would be motivated to respond rapidly to changing circumstances. Importantly too, it would not subscribe to any ideology that would limit the range of approaches it could explore.