Priorities

It's lamentable (to me) that so much brainpower gets channeled into lucrative, but socially useless, activities:

High-speed traders are feuding over a way to save 3.2 billionths of a second

A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world’s quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world’s largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster. The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. Link Alexander Osipovich, 'Wall Street Journal', 15 December 2025

We shouldn't condemn these people, whatever the net results of their collective actions. They are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer; and few of us spend all our time solving the world's problems. It's the incentives that are perverse. If people can make enough cash to bring up a family by shaving off some nanoseconds per financial transaction more than the next guy, then that is what they will strive to do. It is disappointing, though, that the undoubted ingenuity that went into these traders' software isn't channeled into more socially beneficial activities. 

Social Policy Bonds could change that. A bond regime would reward people for solving society's urgent, long-term problems. It would stimulate diverse, adaptive approaches the nature of which we need not know in advance, but which are necessary given the failings of our current political systems to end the militarisation of our planet, deal with climate change or otherwise improve social and environmental well-being. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would allow us to target broad global and national goals explicitly, while channeling the market's efficiencies into the best use of our limited resources. Given that the survival of the planet itself is under threat, I think the case for such targeting is a strong one, even if we have to give up high-frequency trading to get there. Incentives aren't everything, but they do matter.