Vortices of bureaucracy: the masonic model

A fascinating article about the United Nations confirms my thinking that any long-lasting conventional organisation, be it public- or private-sector, gradually loses sight of its initial mission, such that its over-arching goal becomes self-perpetuation: 

Over the past eight decades, the United Nations has expanded to encompass an alphabet soup of humanitarian agencies and subsidiary organs with colossal, overlapping ambitions, supported by layers and layers of middle managers. There are endless commissions and centers and conferences and committees, departments and offices and institutes and forums tangled up in abstruse rules and regulations and tasked with eliminating world hunger, sheltering displaced people, adjudicating international disputes, solving climate change, facilitating trade, reducing poverty, and much, much more. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund: all are part of the United Nations. There is a Counter-Terrorism Committee and an Office of Counter-Terrorism; a Department of Peace Operations and a Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. The organization has become so unwieldy that even its most well-meaning workers describe being caught in a culture of toxic inefficiency, hamstrung by problems of accountability, organization, and funding. “The U.N. is a vortex of bureaucracy,” Anadil Hossain, a former senior adviser at the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me. “Something needs to change. It’s embarrassing.”
...

Nondiplomatic employees told me that working at the United Nations had a way of changing them, too, by draining them of motivation. Good work, I heard again and again, was never rewarded, and bad work never punished. “The culture is really, really shocking,” said Salil Shetty, who directed the U.N. Millennium Campaign from 2003 to 2010. “It’s not based on performance and all that. It’s: How do you keep the bosses happy?” Amanda Chicago Lewis,  Wishful thinking, 'Harpers', dated June 2025

I think we need to disaggregate the ostensible aims of organisations like the UN from their other, more human functions. Very often, the two conflict. I'll explain:

I recognize the need of all humans to engage with each other, to discuss, argue, sing or dance together, to share our hopes, to be in fellowship with people who have a similar world view, to identify with symbols, ritual, hierarchy, a clan or tribe or an organisation; above all: to belong. So, while we might have expected that the economic and social shambles that was Marxism would expire with the old Soviet Union, it survives in China and elsewhere, not as an economic system, but as an extraordinarily potent ideology about an economic system. Freudian psychoanalysis, though discredited as a therapy, survives as a cult revolving around the life and work of Sigmund Freud.¹ There is not a single proven example of a visit to Earth by an alien spacecraft – yet opinion polls consistently show that more than half of adult Americans believe in such an event.² Members of such organisations may have some belief in their ostensible aims or underlying ideology but those fellowship benefits of belonging to a body of like-minded people are at least as important. 

The 'rightness' of such belonging, the elation and joy that come with satisfying a genuine human need, can lead participants in organisations to fail to see the organisation's malign effect on outsiders. Gareth Gore, in an interview, explains the origins and subsequent history of Opus Dei: 

The organization was founded by a Spanish Catholic priest, Josemaria Escrivá, in the 1930s in pre-civil war Spain, when society was deeply divided. He was born in northern Spain in 1902. The best way of getting a really good education in those days was by joining the church, joining the seminary. That really opened up your options. So he went to the seminary and he became a priest, but his passion really was law. For a long time he considered just leaving the priesthood entirely. He applied for various jobs.

But then one day, while he was on retreat, he had what he called a vision from God. He said that God had effectively spoken to him and given him the outlines of this new organization. He’d received this vision from God of how ordinary Catholics could better serve God in their ordinary lives.

... In the early 1930s, Spain was on the brink of civil war. The country is deeply divided. The workers have risen up against the monarchy. They’re demanding new rights for themselves. And—critically for this story—they’re beginning to turn their backs on the church.

And Escrivá, as a priest, as a conservative man, he’s appalled by this. He starts believing all of these conspiracy theories. He blames it on the communists, on the Bolsheviks, on the Jews and the Masons. And this organization that he’d founded just a few years earlier, on this quite benign philosophy of serving God through striving for perfection in your daily lives, begins to take on this sinister and deeply political hue. Gareth Gore, Opus Dei, embezzlement, and human trafficking, ARC, 21 January 2025

'How can this organisation', well-meaning, hardworking employees ask, 'which is so necessary to my well-being, possibly be corrupt, corrupting or destructive to society?' And so begins the movement away from its stated ideals and towards the enshrinement of self-perpetuation as its primary goal.

I think we'd all be better off by explicitly dividing the roles, such that we have the new type of organisation solely devoted to achieving our social goals, and other organisations that explicitly put our other human needs first. The ostensible reasons for our polarized, dysfunctional politics, are not so much about our goals, but about the ways we think they shall be best achieved. We could instead debate social and environmental outcomes, about which there is more consensus and more objectivity. My suggestion is that, in setting up a Social Policy Bond regime that would target our long-term social goals, explicitly and unwaveringly, we'd bring new organisations into being; organisations whose structure, composition and all activities would be subordinate to their targeted goal. I have written about this new sort of organisation here. This new type of organisation would, I believe, be the most efficient way of achieving our goals but because its composition would be fluid, its structure protean, and many of its activities short lived, would fail to satisfy our need for fellowship and belonging. 

To complement such loose collections of capabilities as these organisations would embody, I think we'd see more organisations solely devoted to satisfying our fellowship needs, with perhaps some occasional overspill into charitable works. These fellowship bodies could retain the name, symbols, buildings and initial membership of organisations, like the United Nations, that have failed in their ostensible aims, yet still fulfil their fellowship functions. 

There is a precedent, and it is the world of Freemasons. Some groups of working or 'operative' stonemasons began to allow non-masons into the guilds. Operative masonic lodges raised money by charging the gentry for admission to their "mysteries".  (See here.) The guilds and mysteries persisted after the great British and European cathedrals had been built. Operative masons declined in number; 'speculative' masons took over, and today there are around six million freemasons worldwide.

Could the governments of the United Nations, or members of Opus Dei or our politicians and everyone else with a vested interest in the power-structures to which they belong and from which they derive inspiration be persuaded to give up their dysfunctional organisations and divisive politics, and become 'speculative' policymakers? Social Policy Bonds would take on their current duties, while 'masonic' versions of the UN etc would fulfil their need for fellowship, ritual and hierarchy.

I think everyone - politicians and public - would be happier if our failing 'operative' organisations were nudged toward the 'speculative' role, and the real work of achieving our more vital and mundane social and environmental goals were, in effect, contracted out to motivated investors in Social Policy Bonds. 

References:

¹ See, for example, Final Analysis, by Jeffrey Masson, Harper Collins, 1990. 

² For the flying saucer myth, it will always be January 1950, Robert R Young, 'Skeptical Inquirer', volume 18, number 5, Fall 1994. 

Climate change: “The silence of these writers is dreadfully expressive”

Concluding his thorough and, to my mind, convincing argument against the findings of several researchers into the economics of climate change, David Barker writes: 

We are forced by this pattern of errors to consider the possibility that some of the body of research I have critiqued is less than honest. It appears to be the result of bias—implicit collaboration of authors, reviewers and editors to promote socially and politically acceptable ideas leading to conformity and suppression of alternative ideas. Additional evidence of bias in academia can be found in surveys of literature on the effect of climate change on the economy. Two recent surveys ... discuss hundreds of papers, including the papers I critiqued, but neither of them cite my critiques. In the 2020s, it is impossible that the authors of survey pieces like these would have been unaware of my work. The authors also knew that my critiques have not been answered. The irresponsibility of failing to provide a balanced review of the literature in these articles can only be explained by ideological bias. Reflection after five papers about climate change, David Barker, 'Econ Journal Watch', March 2025

I'm not sure which comes first: ideology or competition for funding or recognition. Either way, there are incentives in the academic world to be dishonest. When there's too much dishonesty or ideological bias (see here, for instance) then we see what we are experiencing now: a backlash against the entire scientific enterprise. 

My position on climate change doesn't rely on knowing whether it's actually happening or what's causing it. In that sense, it transcends ideology. We need to decide what aspects of the climate we want to target. Especially, we need to decide whether to focus its adverse impacts on human, animal and plant life, or to target such physical variables as area of sea ice, temperature, or some combination. Under a Climate Stability Bond regime, we could target an wide array of variables, each of which would have to fall within a stipulated range for a period of decades before the bonds would be redeemed. Investors in the bonds would have incentives to prioritise the efficiency with which research (along with all the other necessary steps) will help achieve our climate change goal, rather than the ideology or status of the relevant scientists, and to do so continually.

I've written copiously about climate change on this blog (here and here, for example) and there are links to my longer pieces on Climate Stability Bonds on my main website.

EVs and air pollution

Society and the environment are complicated. There are vast numbers of variables, feedback loops, and time lags, all of which make our current systems of regulation ineffective. Here's the Economist writing about electric road vehicles (EVs):

In addition to being less well regulated than exhaust fumes, non-exhaust particles are also less well studied. That is changing. One study published in February ... found that some brake-pad dust seems to be more damaging to dish-grown human lung cells than diesel-fume particles. This was in part because of its higher levels of copper, which can damage cells and DNA. Though exact figures are elusive, scientists estimate that EVs produce more of these non-exhaust particles than other cars. This is because their batteries make them heavier, causing them to generate more friction. Electric vehicles also cause air pollution, the 'Economist', 11 April 2025

Our knowledge of complex scientific relationships is always going to be incomplete and, most likely expanding. Failing to recognise that, leads to the sort of disastrous regulation that, in the UK, stimulated diesel consumption:

In 2001, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown introduced a new system of car tax aimed at protecting the environment. In actual reality it fostered a popular move towards highly polluting diesel cars - a trend which according to some experts has been associated with thousands of premature deaths a year.  Why officials in Labour government pushed 'dash for diesel', Martin Rosenbaum, bbc.co.uk, 16 November 2017

Our politicians need to resist the temptation to latch on to some relationship that they think they understand and regulate accordingly. The fact is that we simply don't know whether, for instance, EVs are better for the environment, just as Gordon Brown didn't really know whether diesel or petrol is worse for the environment. 

This is where Social Policy Bonds could help. The scientific facts change, along with our understanding of those facts. We need policies that can respond effectively to those changes. Current policymaking cannot handle the complex relationships that characterise the environment, nor can they take account of our expanding knowledge about those relationships.

Social Policy Bonds would take a different approach. Rather than focus on the means of achieving, in this example, a reduction in air pollution, they would reward the achievement of reduced air pollution. Doing so would generate incentives for bondholders to bring it about at least cost. They might well carry out life-cycle analyses in their attempt to do so. But they would do so on a continuing basis, investigating and even financing the research they deem necessary to reduce air pollution as quickly and cheaply as possible. They would both stimulate and respond to increased knowledge of scientific relationships and technical advances.

As important, though, is that a Social Policy Bond regime would compel clarity over society's real goals. In this case, we'd have to answer the question: is reducing fossil fuel use an end in itself, or a means to other ends? And if the latter, what are those ends? Let's say those ends include, inter alia, improving air quality. Now, is improving air quality an end in itself, or is it the effects that air pollution has on human, plant and animal life that we really want to be targeting? And, if the latter, why not target these ends directly? There might be good reasons, involving the costs of monitoring, for targeting indirect means of achieving our goals, but we do need to keep our goals clearly in mind. Those goals, unlike the focus of today's regulatory environment, would have a long-term focus. There'd also be more agreement about them - and hence more buy-in from the public - than there is about the supposed means of achieving them. 

For more about applications of the Social Policy Bond concept to the environment, please see here.

Translation doesn't need grammar; policy solutions don't need root causes.

An excerpt from a letter published in the Financial Times:

Translation is one of the many positive revolutions brought about by artificial intelligence, but, surprisingly it has gone largely unnoticed. While machine translation has made constant but slow progress since the first Georgetown-IBM experiment in 1954 the shift by Google by 2016 from structural rule-based systems relying on grammatical structures to statistical models and neural machine translation was a major breakthrough. Automated translation now takes into account the context to solve the ambiguity of some words or phrases, and to grasp the tone as well as the style in order to find the right vocabulary and the most suited idiomatic forms. Being trained on vast datasets, it is also very unlikely that it will get stuck on a rare or technical expression that a human translator will in turn struggle to find in a paperback dictionary. How AI is overcoming Europe's language barriers, Philippe Huberdeau, 'Financial Times', 30 April 2025

To me, this has application in the world of policy. Our current policymaking system relies on being able to trace the causes of our social problems, to do so continously, and then to try to deal with them. This identification-based model works well when cause and effect can be reliably identified, and don't change much over time, nor differ much over space.

In today's complex societies, it isn't good enough. There are too many variables; and feedback loops mean that implementation of policies changes how people and systems respond. The current model cannot address such complexities, so we get fossilised policies that also tend to be one-size-fits-all. 

I don't propose that we try to use AI techniques to solve policymaking goals such as reducing crime, improving health or, at the global level, eliminating war. Trying to condense all of human history into the context according to which effective policies could be made is impossible. Reducing the human experience into terms that machines can understand can't be done. Partly because it's too great, partly because it's too subjective and partly because it keeps expanding. 

But what we can learn from the application of AI to language translation is that we don't need to fully understand everything about how a language works - its grammar - to translate it effectively. And this is where the Social Policy Bond concept, with its focus on outcomes, enters the picture. Investors in the bonds don't necessarily need to identify and deal with any supposed 'root causes' of crime, war or any of our other social or environmental pathologies in order to address them effectively. Trying to do so would be a Herculean task and so can readily be invoked as an excuse to do nothing. What we can do, and what a Social Policy Bond regime would do, is give incentives to investors to look for the best ways of solving our problems on a continuous bases. That might, in some cases, mean looking for root causes. But it might simply mean researching, trialling and refining many diverse potential solutions and adopting those that are most promising - constantly. Achieving our social goals requires diverse, adaptive approaches. The current policymaking system delivers neither. 

For more on this theme see here and here.