The unimportance of competence

There's a long list of criteria by which people judge for whom we'll vote, including: ideology, personality, public image (including looks), racial or religious identity, charisma, height, or simply how prominent a candidate is in the media. Way down the bottom of this list would be competence. This is partly because we rarely look back over candidates' records - nor even that of the administrations of which they were members. Admittedly, because of the large number of variables and society's complexity, it's difficult to ascribe outcomes to recent individual performance. I think we could do better.

I believe we'd all benefit if we were offered a choice of outcomes, rather than one of political parties or candidates, many of whom can get away with talking only vaguely about what they hope to achieve in office. A Social Policy Bond regime would do this; people would choose the outcomes they wish to target and their priority. This would have many benefits. First, it would change the way in which we judge administrations: competence would shoot up the list of criteria by which we judge an administration. Second, it would get us used to the notions of trade-offs and opportunity cost when choosing which goals we should target. Third, it would drastically shrink the role of government in allocating funding; not theoretically a goal in itself, but given the temptations and actual corruption scandals, even in relatively less corrupt countries, it would contribute to more efficient government. Under a bond regime, government would relinquish its role in allocating funding to public- and private-sector bodies: this would be done by investors in the bonds, whose over-arching goal would be the efficiency with which society's social and environmental goals shall be achieved. Markets, in economic theory and on all the evidence, are the best way of allocating scarce resources. But government would still have important roles doing things that only it can do: articulating society's goals and raising the revenue that would reward those who achieve them.  

There would be other benefits. Policymaking would be more transparent. And there'd be a far more direct link between stated policy objectives and the activities undertaken to achieve them. So that, say, if we collectively decide we want to do something about cleaning up the environment, an Environmental Policy Bond regime pay people to clean up the environment. If we want to reduce crime rates, we'd reward investors in crime reduction bonds only when crime rates have fallen. 

We need to target outcomes, rather than wait decades for government to agree on what's required and then make policy that might, or might not, do something to achieve it. What is important is not how our urgent social and environmental problems are solved, nor which body shall try to solve them, but that they are solved. Social Policy Bonds are one way of getting government to focus on what we as a society actually want to achieve and out of the business of identifying genuinely (or not) difficult scientific and social relationships. The first is something that democratic governments can actually do quite well. The second is something that markets do much better, because scientific and social relationships are complex and ever-changing, and because incentives are crucial. 

Videos or incentives: how best to end conflict

We often hear war correspondents say that they undertake their gruelling assignments so that others will come to realize the horror of armed conflict. I don't doubt their sincerity, nor their bravery in embedding themselves in military campaigns and recording the carnage that is the outcome of man's inhumanity to man. I do, however, doubt whether widely disseminated graphic reporting is the best way, or even an effective way, of bringing about an end to war. They may be the best we have come up with so far - but they have done nothing to end violent political conflict. Their graphic reports, pictures and (especially) videos probably inflame conflict more than they defuse it. 

Piling up weapons, unfalsifiable 'deterrence' doctrine, peace talks, talks about talks: these are roundabout methods of addressing our tendency to destroy others of our species and a big chunk of the natural environment too. They lack even the grim entertainment value of the reporters' images and commentary. Here's a question: if we are truly serious about ending armed conflict, why don't we reward the ending of armed conflict rather than the tried, tested and failed means of preventing it? Incentives matter, and the current incentives are all for arms merchants to sell more arms, for bureaucrats to engage in endless talks, for fanatics and governments to inflame aggressive religious and nationalistic passions. 

Humanity would benefit if there were countervailing financial incentives. The wish that almost everyone has, when we are not reacting to propaganda or provocation, to live in peace, has not been monetised and so, sadly, counts for very little when set against the interests of the weapons manufacturers, bureaucrats and ideological zealots. 

Which is where the Social Policy Bond concept, applied in the service of world peace, could make a contribution. Under a bond regime targeting a combination of such metrics for reduction as numbers of people killed and made homeless, people would be rewarded for the achievement of sustained periods during which wars are reduced or eliminated. 

World Peace Bonds would channel the market’s incentives and efficiencies into ending all violent conflict. Ideally, governments, institutions, the billionaire class and anyone else with a genuine interest in peace would contribute to a fund that would be used to redeem the bonds, which would create a coalition of interests with a powerful incentive to reduce the level of violent political conflict. Initial funding could be There would be difficulties defining peace and quantifying for targeting purposes the level of conflict. It would probably be more realistic to begin by issuing Nuclear Peace Bonds, which would entail rewarding, say, 30 years during which no nuclear device would be deployed and detonated in any sort of conflict - a more readily verifiable target than reducing the level of conflict in the world, though hopefully a stepping stone in that direction. For my recent book on World Peace Bonds, please see here, and there are more links to my work on conflict reduction here. 

Relying on metrics

In our complex, populous societies we're not going to escape the use of metrics as indicators of social well-being. Social Policy Bonds aim to target broad goals that are meaningful to ordinary people. They therefore need metrics that are carefully devised, robust, verifiable and, preferably, easy and cheap to monitor. A Social Policy Bond regime, ideally, would use reliable metrics in a considered, coherent manner. There are dangers in taking metrics as ends in themselves, in using them incoherently, and in ways that conflict with people's well-being. Unfortunately, that's the direction in which we're moving. Having read The tyranny of metrics by Jerry Muller, I've written about the limitations of metrics. 

 Our societies aren't going to return to the times when policy is made for groups of 150 (see Dunbar's number). It follows that metrics will be the means to determining how well society is doing. This has its risks, but it would seem preferable to letting ideology, emotion, personality or revenge psychology determine the direction in which societies move. 

 

One of the risks arises from Campbell's Law: 

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. Campbell's Law

Some examples of the application of this Law are given here. Another recent example is described in a study of the Trump administration's efforts to present COVID-19 statistics that would discourage restricting economic activities and encourage reopening the economy. The problem is that there is no real alternative to quantitative indicators when trying to measure and improve society's well-being. The alternatives are using no measures at all, or using those that have no bearing on well-being or may even be in conflict with it. The latter approach is the most common on western democracies. Currently our governments rely on a motley array of narrow, short-term, Mickey Mouse micro-targets, including the over-arching, de facto target of Gross Domestic Product, with its many flaws, some of great consequence. 

A Social Policy Bond regime, by contrast, would target broad meaningful outcomes with indicators inextricably linked to what we wish to see. At the national level, we'd target improvements in society's mental and physical health; at the global level we could target indicators of adverse natural or man-made disasters. One urgent, and easy-to-monitor goal would be nuclear peace. Most other goals would be less easy to quantify reliably, but we do need to ask what are the essential elements of social and environmental well-being and how can we best target them reliably. Our current political systems allow our rulers to duck these questions and distract us all with spurious arguments about ideology, personality, image and sound bites.