Copper, nappies, and the environment

Renewable energy is not an end in itself. Replacing fossil fuels with renewables also entails environmental damage. Copper, for example: 

Problem is, that the generation and transmission of low carbon electricity requires more copper per megawatt than conventional fossil fuel power plants. Offshore wind farms, for example, take around 11 tonnes of copper per megawatt to build—that is over 5 times as much as gas-fired power plants. Onshore wind and solar are also more copper-intensive, at around 1.7 and 1.4 times, respectively....Even if we could extract every ounce of copper in the ground in the coming decades, we could only replace 22% of our ageing fossil fuel energy system with an all electric one, then would be left wondering what to do with the remaining 78%…Trying to switch to “renewables” or building AI data centers so late in the game is thus not only technically infeasible but ill-advised, accelerating resource depletion even further and bringing about collapse even faster. Running on empty: Copper, 'The Honest Sorcerer, 7 December 2025

The inescapable fact is that whether we aim to increase energy consumption using fossil fuels or renewables means the continuing destruction of our environment. With renewables, we might see a small reduction in greenhouse gases emitted over a period of decades but, as the article excerpted above says, 'Copper mining is an extremely dirty, water intensive and polluting business. No wonder local communities are doing everything they can to avoid another mine being built next to their village....' Such trade-offs are implicit in most of our power generation choices and consumption choices. What is the policymaker to do? Current policy is heavily influenced by the short-term goals of politicians, and corporations and their lobbyists. In today's media, climate change is the most prominent environmental problem we face - and it is a huge problem. How do we weight small reductions in emissions of the gases that (probably) aggravate it, against the devastation wrought by, in this example, more copper mining and processing? 

We can't do so objectively. But what I suggest is that, instead of targeting the supposed means towards environmental goals, we come to some agreement about what those goals should be, and aim to achieve them. Thus Environmental Policy Bonds; an application of the Social Policy Bond idea to the environment, under which we'd agree on broad, long-term targets encompassing all aspects of the environment, contract out the achievement of these targets to investors bidding for the bonds, and reward investors as these targets are achieved. 

Targets must be broad, so that we do not achieve one environmental goal at the expense of another. So, for example, we target air pollution, rather than, say, nitrous oxide pollution; loss of biodiversity, rather than polar bears or pandas. 

The bonds imply humility, in the sense that they acknowledge that we don't know what future knowledge of scientific relationships will tell us. Take the seemingly simple question of disposable versus cloth nappies, which embodies in microcosm the difficulty of making policy about bigger concerns: there are always angles that we cannot foresee. Some years ago, a reader of the New Scientist wrote about nappies: 

.... I wonder whether the research comparing [cloth] to disposables took into account the fact that babies using cloth nappies tend to be toilet-trained day and night at a much earlier age – there is little more uncomfortable than a wet cloth nappy. A difference of six months to a year would lead to a child using 1100 to 2200 extra disposable diapers or nappies – a lot of extra landfill. Cleo Mussi, Letter to the editor of 'New Scientist', 12 December 2021

No government regulation, which uses science that is inherently fossilised, can account for the complexity of changing scientific relationships and our expanding knowledge thereof. An Environmental Policy Bond regime would supply market incentives to investors in the bonds to keep up their research and investigations and pursue only the most promising approaches to solving the targeted problem. The bonds would reward the sustained achievement of our goals, so that bond investors would be constantly researching and implementing only the most promising of the possible approaches to solving our problems, in ways that no government body can. 

For more about Social Policy Bonds see here. There are links there to papers on Environmental Policy Bonds and Climate Stability Bonds.  

The EU: "Regulations 'R' us"

The Economist writes:  

The EU’s latest big new rule is the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation ..., which came into force in August. Among other things, it will eventually ban single-use shampoo bottles used by hotels, and mini-sachets of ketchup or other condiments. However valuable its aspirations might be, much of it is, unfortunately, a bureaucratic mess. The EU’s new packaging rules are a bureaucratic bungle, the 'Economist', 24 September, 2026

It's unfortunate that the first instinct of our political class is to impose new regulations. Assuming that the EU has identified that there is a problem caused by too much waste, the policymaking system that they work within does not let them target a solution directly, but only to target what they think are likely causes of the problem - or those causes that they can legislate against. Even if they get it right, there's no guarantee that, by banning a small part of the problem, they won't create a bigger problem. Society is just too complex to try to identify root causes of problems, and then ban them. 

It's not just the EU, of course. Our policymaking systems evolved when society was less complex, and the sources of our problems were relatively easy to identify. In health, for instance, sanitation was an obviously desirable need. But the days when John Snow could trace a cholera epidemic in London to a polluted water pump have gone. Today’s health problems, as do most of our biggest and most urgent social and environmental problems, have many causes, known and unknown and constantly changing, as is our knowledge about them. So today’s policymakers can try to deal with, say, childhood obesity by pushing out dietary recommendations, taxing sugary drinks and encouraging sport or nominating a 'childhood obesity tsar’. Well-intended measures that could have some impact, but do not encourage people to search for solutions or approaches that lie beyond the expertise of policymakers or that threaten the livelihoods of their advisors. Politicians pick up the only tool available to them - a ban - and use that. 

My suggestion is that policymaking should focus not on the alleged means to certain ends, but on the ends themselves. It should, in consultation with the public, decide on which broad outcomes should be targeted and set up a system that rewards the people who achieve those outcomes. So, returning to the one-use shampoo and ketchup sachets; if the problem is one of too much waste, then an outcome-based policymaking body would target reductions of, say, 5 percent in the volume of waste created every year, and let motivated investors work out how best to achieve that reduction. 

It won't happen until we start thinking of policy in terms outcomes. Regulations about shampoo sachets could be imposed only in a policymaking system that pays lip service to outcomes, but can't relinquish control over how to achieve them. All governments think the same way, and we too, ordinary members of the public, are accustomed to the endless stream of rules, laws, and regulations emanating from our politicians. Any long-term  goals they do talk about are expressed only as vague aspirations that nobody really expects to be reached any time soon. The emphasis is on process and procedure; making sure that all the legislative boxes are ticked, and that failure to comply is punished. 

I think we should do better. If the goal is to improve the environment, we need to reward people who improve the environment; not impose regulations whose ostensible aim is to improve the environment, but that are unlikely to do so in any meaningful way. Social Policy Bonds are my suggestion: not only would they oblige us to think in terms of explicit and broad, societal goals; they would inject market incentives into their solution. Instead of meaningless micro-targets, their focus on outcomes would bring more public participation into the policymaking process: an end in itself, and a necessary condition for the buy-in that is  necessary when policies create losers as well as winners. 

For all my work on Social Policy Bonds see my website here. Within that site, for more about environmental applications of the idea see here. And for more about how the bonds would encourage more buy-in see here.  

Social Policy Bonds and prediction markets

Oliver Milman writes: 

In the US, big online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are considering a new area of growth beyond mere sport and crypto: the climate itself. Kalshi recently reported 500% growth in weather and climate wagers over the past year, taking the market to a $1.1bn, and is now partnering with the Weather Company, which owns the Weather Channel, to boost its credibility in this new arena. Would you bet on the future of our planet?, Oliver Milman, the Guardian, 25 September 2026

In these prediction markets there are counterparties to the bets that people make so that, with some people hoping to see a reduction in the rate of climate change, there are others who will lose out if that happens. That, of course, differs from my conception of Social Policy Bonds, for which there is no such counterparty; rather the 'bettors' (actually, investors in the bonds) are aiming to benefit from a large sum of money, held in escrow, and paid out only when whatever social or environmental goal has been achieved. This sum could be made up of contributions from supranational bodies, national governments, corporations, philanthropists and the public, or some combination. So, rather than sit back and hope their forecasts about, in this example, the climate, prove correct, the investors in Climate Stability Bonds would have incentives to actually do something about achieving our climate goal. It is the difference between what investors pay for the bonds, and the redemption value of the bonds that motivates investors to help achieve the targeted goal. Rather than being passive holders of, essentially, a betting slip, as in prediction markets, a Social Policy Bond regime would turn bondholders into active investors, working to achieve socially desirable outcomes. 

Price signalling

There is one feature common to prediction markets and Social Policy Bonds: the useful information that markets generate. As Mr Milman writes:

A Kalshi spokesperson told me the company sees itself as part of “well-calibrated forecasting data” – essentially using the wisdom of the market to help predict how hot it will get, how bad floods will become and other such environmental outcomes.

The value of Social Policy Bonds would rise and fall, depending on how close potential investors think the goal they target is to being achieved. Their value could rise owing to holders' efforts to achieve the goal or because of events beyond holders' control. So, if Climate Stability Bonds are issued, and new research finds that the climate is changing more rapidly than people thought, then their value would fall. Factors other than those related to climate - interest rates - for example, would also affect the bonds' value. The market value of the bonds, and their changes over time, would be of great interest to policymakers. I write in more detail about this price signalling in Chapter 5 of my book, Market Solutions for Social and Environmental Problems, the text of which can be downloaded for no charge. 

Key criteria for a Social Policy Bond regime

We're a long way from the days of John Snow, who successfully traced the origin of a serious health problem - a cholera outbreak in London - to a single public water pump. Many of today's most urgent social and environmental problems have multiple causes and are beset by time lags, which makes it difficult to identify how best to solve them. One example: childhood obesity; it's just not amenable to the sort of painstaking analysis done by a single person, however brilliant. Policy today is generally a top-down, one-size-fits-all business, heavily influenced by powerful interest groups, within and outside government. As such, it is, in my view, incapable of dealing with our complex social problems effectively. A Social Policy Bond regime is my suggested way of encouraging people to research, experiment and refine the (most probably) multiple approaches to solving our problems. So: complexity is one attribute of a problem that's best addressed by Social Policy Bonds. Others are:

•         The problem can be solved only in the long term;
•       Existing policies are failing;
•          Diverse, adaptive approaches are going to be necessary;
•         Financial rewards to those involved in achieving objectives are uncorrelated to their effectiveness in doing so; and 
•      Progress toward solving the problem can be readily and objectively monitored.

Many social and environmental problems satisfy these criteria including, at the global level: conflict (war and all forms of political violence) and climate change; and at the national level: crime, unemployment and air and water quality. Other national goals that could be targeted for improvements are literacy, employment and health. I've discussed applications of the Social Policy Bond idea to all these problems, and more, on the SocialGoals.com website.

Closing the gap

This is the first section of a longer piece intended for publication. It will be followed by sections on: the need to express policy in terms of outcomes; and Social Policy Bonds

The gap between politicians and public 

There’s a large and growing gap between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent. This has always been true in autocratic countries, but it is now also a feature of democracies. I believe this stems from the increasingly opaque ways in which government works, such that the only people who can follow policymaking closely are politicians themselves, lawyers, well-off corporations or their lobbyists. Our policymaking process is so obscure, so unknowable by ordinary people that the alienation between politicians the public is inevitable. Whether this is intentional or not, is not the point; more important is that no politician wants to make it more transparent. Such a system is ripe for gaming and manipulation, but even when working according to the letter of the law, it inherently favours those who have the time and inclination to involve themselves - or their paid agents - in the minutiae of the policymaking process. Any link between what politicians say, and what ordinary people actually experience is undetectable.
Knowing this, we are reduced to choosing our representatives on the bases of their campaign promises, looks, ability to produce superficially convincing soundbites or, perhaps most portentous of all: identity. That is, those of the electorate who can be bothered to turn out to vote; the rest of us have taken on the learned helplessness that is characteristic of subjects that come to believe that their lives can neither be improved nor avoided. The result is clear, even in democracies: disenchantment with our leaders, mistrust and cynicism, and the disturbing drift toward authoritarianism and demagoguery.

I believe this his happening because our policymaking system focuses on concerns that have little obvious relevance to members of the public: institutional structures and funding arrangements, law changes, and macroeconomic abstractions. Oracular pronouncements of lofty goals are sometimes heard, but nothing can be pinned down and nobody takes them seriously. It is almost as if political systems the world over, whatever their origins, ere purposely designed to alienate the public. It’s hardly surprising then that there’s a strong demand for the sort of sloganeering that is often inflammatory and dishonest, but does at least express ordinary people’s concerns in language we can understand. 

The system’s complexity makes it difficult to share policy decisions and dilemmas with non-members of the political caste. As with any profession, as specialisation increases, so does the difficulty of communicating with the public. This matters more with politics than other professions with politicians, because their decisions affect all of us. The mistrust is mutual and self-perpetuating, so that now the most fundamental notion of policymaking - that all policy choices will create winners and losers - is never communicated to the public, because we’d see it as a lie or a self-serving admission of incompetence. We don’t trust politicians, we don’t understand their language, so why should they bother us with unpalatable truths? 

It’s essential, I believe, to close the trust gap, mainly because doing so would increase our buy-in to the policy decisions made on our behalf. The trust gap would narrow if people other than politicians, wealthy corporations and lobbyists could follow and have some say in the policymaking process. But the policymaking system’s opacity and complexity make it unattractive to people who work outside it. And one big reason for that, I believe, is that policy is formulated in terms that are of little interest to non-specialists. 

What money can't buy

The implicit target of almost all policymaking is to maximise either national income, expressed as GDP, or things that national income can buy. The weaknesses of GDP as an indicator of societal well-being are well documented. A huge flaw is that it fails to capture contributions to well-being for which there is no market. Hence:

No less fundamental than its source, then, are questions of the quantity of energy consumed, the ways in which it is distributed, and the purposes it serves. This issue of quantity versus quality has largely been ignored in mainstream environmental discourses — partly because the imperative to reduce total energy usage solicits [sic] no tech-driven solutions that money can buy. Not cool, Mireille Roddier, 'Places', September 2026

And:

Defensive medicine can be simply defined as medical responses undertaken to avoid liability rather than to benefit the patient. Billions for Defense: The Pervasive Nature of Defensive Medicine, Richard E Anderson, The Doctors Company, November 1999

In both cases the market fails society. In the first case by encouraging energy consumption that is excessive, in that environmental costs aren't captured by the market and so borne by society. In the second, the costs of excessive screening and treatment are similarly borne by society. 

A Social Policy Bond regime could reduce the costs to society of these market failures; it would do so by explicitly identifying our goals, and rewarding people for achieving them. A vital first step is to be explicit about exactly what we want to achieve. So, if energy consumption itself is seen as undesirable, we could reward those bring about its reduction. More likely, it's the environmental costs of energy consumption that we regard as problematic, and applying the Social Policy Bond idea to the environment would achieve that goal. 

Similarly, defensive medicine occurs because we do not explicitly target or reward improvements in society's health; mostly we reward medical interventions, and so incentivise their excessive use. Applying the Social Policy Bond idea to health would help solve this problem. A government could issue Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds, targeting an array of health indicators, each of which would have to fall within an approved range for a sustained period before the bonds would be redeemed. 

Social Policy Bonds express policy goals in terms of outcomes, rather than the alleged, and often very indirect, means of achieving them. Their aim is to encourage people to research, experiment and refine diverse, adaptive approaches to solving our long-term social and environmental problems; many of which are hugely important, but have been neglected because markets don't or can't address them. 

Risk aversion rules

The Economist writes about India: 

Bureaucracy runs on risk aversion. Officials worried about anti-corruption bodies award contracts to the lowest bidder, despite having the discretion to weigh up other factors. They splurge on top-tier consultants because it gives them cover for their decisions. A bureaucrat who takes a risk and produces a terrific outcome gets no reward. Why can't India's government build a decent website?, the 'Economist', 28 June 2026

Not much has changed since I began advocating Social Policy Bonds as a means of targeting outcomes. Politicians focus on institutional structures and funding. Bureaucracy, in India and elsewhere, prioritises process. Meantime public political debate is taken up with public images, sound bites, vague promises and identity. The result is government that is inefficient and ineffective, in that it prioritises narrow, short-term goals, while refusing to address urgent, long-term challenges such as budget deficits, environmental depredations, health and violent political conflict. One result is that the gap between government and people is widening in countries democratic or not, the world over.

The gap would narrow if more people participated in policymaking. One reason, I believe, why we're not very interested is that policy is formulated in terms that are difficult to relate to outcomes that are meaningful to natural persons, as distinct from corporate bodies. Policymakers appear to concern themselves with decisions about funding for different government agencies, dispensing patronage to big business and other lobbies, presenting themselves in the best light ... almost anything, in fact, except outcomes that mean something to real people.

A government that issued Social Policy Bonds would, from the outset, have to concern itself with social and environmental outcomes. Its main role would be to articulate society's wishes regarding social and environmental outcomes, and to raise the revenue that would fund these outcomes. Unlike most of the current determinants of policy, the language of outcomes and the necessary trade-offs between them is comprehensible to people other than politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and public relations experts. For that reason, more people would be drawn into policymaking - an end in itself, as well as a means toward getting greater public buy-in to the resulting policies.

Expressing policy in terms of outcomes, and the consequent closing of the gap between public and policymakers would be one valuable benefit arising from a Social Policy Bond regime. The other would be the much greater efficiency in achieving social and environmental goals once the market, rather than a handful of politicians, decides who shall achieve these goals, and how they shall be achieved. 

 

World Peace Bonds - a guide for philanthropists

 This article was commissioned by Billionaire. I am uncertain as to whether it's been published

Incentives for peace: World Peace Bonds

World Peace Bonds are a way in which the market’s incentives and efficiencies can be channelled to those people who are most successful at reducing conflict. Philanthropists could get the ball rolling by contributing to a fund that would be used to redeem non-interest-bearing bonds only when world peace had been achieved and sustained for, say, thirty years. The aim is to encourage diverse and adaptive approaches to reducing or eliminating wars and civil wars. The bonds would reward the achievement of the peace goal, regardless of who achieves it or how they do so. The redemption fund could be swelled by philanthropists’ undertaking to match donations from others, including NGOs and the public.

The bonds would be issued on the open market. They’d fetch a fraction of their redemption value, because the peace goal is necessarily remote. But the bonds would be tradeable; their value would rise and fall as the market sees achievement of peace as more or less likely. Investors in the bonds wouldn’t have to wait for the bonds to be redeemed before benefiting from holding them: they’d do what they could to achieve peace, see their bonds rise in value, and then sell their bonds to those best placed to take the next steps. The bonds would always be in the hands of those who think they can do best to advance the peace goal quickly and at least cost. They’d form a tacit coalition, of variable composition, with the sole aim of maximising the reduction of conflict per unit outlay.

A long-term perspective, sadly missing from many of today’s peace-building activities, is essential. A lasting peace is more likely to be a just peace; the ceasefires and truces of today do little more than allow bad actors to inflame resentment and re-arm. Investors, knowing that sustained peace will be rewarded, would research, experiment and refine their peace-building initiatives, would concentrate on the most promising of these, and – something that doesn’t always happen today – would terminate those that achieve little.

The long-term outlook would encourage a wider range of peace-building initiatives than those that even well-meaning politicians undertake today. Investors in World Peace Bonds could lobby or work with governments to, say, change and enforce laws that make wars at home or overseas a less likely prospect. They could finance sports matches between potential protagonists, promote anti-war programmes on TV, or set up exchange schemes for students and schoolchildren. They could try to cajole the financial supporters of conflict into redirecting their funds along more edifying lines. They could offer poor countries different forms of aid, including education and scientific aid, and measures aimed at enlightening populations. They could co-opt, bribe, coerce or otherwise undermine those who foment conflict. They could facilitate liaisons between people of all ages of different ethnic or religious groups. The crucial point is that bondholders have more freedom and incentive to explore and carry out such diverse initiatives than governments or other international bodies, and more incentive to focus only on those that most promising.

Of course, there are many hard-working employees of existing public- and private-sector organisations who are already trying to achieve peace. But they typically have little funding or are not paid by results. Investors in World Peace Bonds would reward the most efficient of these bodies, allowing them not just to raise the salaries of their existing employees, but also to attract more expertise and more resources.

Powerful people in governments, religious institutions or militant organisations might resent the targeting of such objectives by external agencies in this way. They might not be swayed by bondholders’ efforts to influence them – but many of their followers will be. As well, under a World Peace Bond regime they would have to openly declare their opposition to peace itself. It is precisely this focus on the outcome of peace -- rather than activities or institutions -- that would help mobilise and strengthen the coalition working to achieve it.

Humankind’s ingenuity is boundless but too much of it, reacting rationally to the incentives currently on offer, is channelled into such socially dubious activities as advertising dogfood or – God help us! – technical analysis. Actually, it’s worse than that: the incentives now are for those few who have acquired power – including psychopaths, kleptocrats and fanatics - to do whatever they can to retain and extend it, and if that means they must inflame conflict then they will do that. The result is the world we see today: a world wherein sixty major armed conflicts rage; killing, maiming, starving and making millions homeless. And all the while there looms the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.

In such a world, the wishes of the billions of people who don’t want to live in a world of conflict are too diffuse to prevail, and we cannot rely on politicians anywhere to change that. World Peace Bonds would bypass politicians and, by appealing to investors’ self-interest, could bring about the humankind’s most yearned for, but most elusive goal: the permanent elimination of armed conflict.

For more on applications of the concept, please see http://SocialGoals.com.

© Ronnie Horesh April 2026

Sleepwalking into nuclear war

 Antiwar.com describes the US military's latest brainwave: 

The Pentagon is reportedly drafting a new nuclear strategy that’s expected to emphasize the use of tactical nuclear weapons to give the president more “options” in a potential nuclear conflict. The strategy... is being drafted by the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, who has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.” The idea would be to shift the US nuclear strategy away from the focus on using strategic nuclear weapons to wipe out an adversary’s nuclear capabilities and focus more on the possibility of using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons in a “regional” conflict. Pentagon drafting new nuclear strategy..., Dave DeCamp, Anti-war.com, 9 August 2026

The logic is impeccable; each step can be fully explained by invoking the current situation and fears about what others might do. But the stakes now are impossibly high. It's surely worth trying something more radical than the processes that have led us to the brink of catastrophe. 

There are good, hardworking people working for organisations that have as their ostensible aim the ending of conflict at all levels: global, regional and local. But those best placed to know reckon we are closer than ever to nuclear conflict. The Pentagon's new strategy could take us even closer. We need to do things differently. 

Nuclear Peace Bonds could help halt the drift towards nuclear conflict, by putting in place a system that encourages and rewards people for researching, implementing and refining the most promising of such alternative approaches. The would inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of nuclear peace, sustained for a period of at least thirty years. 'Nuclear peace' could be defined as a period during which the number of people killed within 24 hours by the detonation of a nuclear device is less than (say) 500. The bonds would reward those who achieve such a sustained period of nuclear peace, whoever they are and however they do so: only the outcome would be stipulated. 

As well as pursuing activities the exact nature of which we cannot anticipate, investors in Nuclear Peace Bonds could do things that cannot be done by existing organisations, constrained as they are by precedent, and their perceived need to maintain their existence and so satisfy the bodies that fund them. So, for example, in today's world, nobody would have any incentive to bribe people close to decision makers in politics or the military to advocate nuclear disarmament. Likewise, an existing body is unlikely to try to get religious extremists to tone down their rhetoric or take up golf, even if it believed that were the most efficient way of reducing the probability of nuclear conflict. The risk and consequences of exposure and backlash are too great for current institutions to bear. Holders of Nuclear Peace Bonds, however, would not be deterred from whatever actions they think most effective: funds to redeem their bonds could be held in escrow. Once nuclear peace had been achieved and sustained, their reward would be guaranteed. 

Investors in the bonds could operate in parallel with existing bodies. They might decide that some of their activities are worthwhile and channel more funding into the most promising of these. Or, as with the bribery example, they could pursue radically different approaches. The main point is that all the investors decisions would be entirely directed to sustaining nuclear peace at least cost. Their goal would be exactly congruent with society's, and their funding would attract resources and expertise away from some  well-rewarded activities of little social merit. Advertising dog-food or writing algorithms for high-frequency share trading are two examples; there are many others. 

The Social Policy Bond concept, of which Nuclear Peace Bonds are on application hasn't gone very far in the decades since I came up with it. A non-tradable version is now in use in about 25 countries, but it's inherently limited as a means for achieving long-term goals, for reasons that I've explained here and here. I still hope that my original concept will be deployed, as I don't think we are currently on track to meet such huge and urgent challenges as nuclear conflict. 

Everything is backwards...

 A quote attributed to Michael Ellner: 

Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom. Michael Ellner

It's not true in every case, and it's not inevitable, but there's enough truth in it to be disturbing. And, while there are many idealistic doctors and lawyers, the majority become fully invested in their career and dependent on the goodwill of their governing body. And these bodies have, as their overarching goal, self-perpetuation, whatever their original ideals. All their ideals, activities, memberships and rules are subordinate to that goal.

Which is why I believe we should make policy as if these institutions do not exist. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, policy would be expressed in terms of verifiable, transparent outcomes, and any institutions that come into being as a result would have, as their sole focus, the efficient achievement of these outcomes. Such a regime would be ideal for those social and environmental goals for which:

• current policy is failing,
• a long-term view is essential,
• no obvious solutions exist, and
• a range of diverse, adaptive approaches is likely to be essential.

Sadly, there are many big, urgent challenges that satisfy all those criteria. For example, I've written about applying the Social Policy Bond concept to nuclear peace, climate change, and health. These policy areas would all benefit by, first, clarifying exactly what we want to achieve; most likely a set of subsidiary objectives all of which would have to be met before the targeted outcome would be deemed achieved. Second, by channelling the market's efficiencies and incentives into that achievement. What would happen then? With a guaranteed payout on success, investors would compete to bid for the bonds; collude, tacitly or otherwise, to bring about speedy achievement of the goal. This would entail research, experimentation and refinement of a range of possible approaches toward solving the targeted problem, with only the most promising of these approaches being pursued. A mosaic of diverse and adaptive approaches would be the most likely result. I believe a new sort of organisation would arise: again, it might not be a formal body, but its structure and composition, and all its co-ordinating activities would be entirely subordinate to achieving the targeted social or environmental goal. Thus, there would be an inextricable link between the objective of the organisation and society's targeted goal. 

'The ticks are winning': we need to focus on health outcomes

Jonathan Mingle and Sean Rameswaram discuss the tick problem in the US:  

Are we not fighting back against the ticks?

Not really. I mean, this is one of the surprising takeaways from my reporting is that we’re barely even trying. One way of understanding that is to think about two numbers. One number is 90 percent. 90 percent of vector-borne disease cases in the US are from ticks.

90 percent?

Yeah. And yet despite the fact that 90 percent of cases of vector-borne illness come from tick bites, if you look at what local city and county health agencies do in terms of vector control, 80 percent of what they do is mosquito control, and only about 10 or 11 percent of these local health agencies around the country do any kind of tick control. So why is that? It’s a familiar story in the public health world. It’s not enough funding or policy support for trying out, testing, and deploying new approaches to controlling ticks. The ticks are winning, Danielle Hewitt and Sean Rameswaram, 'Mother Jones', 1 August 2026

...Or a lack of incentives. This kind of mismatch between the a problem and the incentives devoted to solving it bedevils all policymaking in areas where existing institutions have no incentive to explore new approaches. It's rife in the field of health policy, where those in the profession have little incentive or capacity to think beyond their speciality, and so advise policymakers accordingly. 

Given the widespread, and justifiable, distrust of pharmaceutical companies, it would seem that this is the time to move towards rewarding those who achieve favourable health outcomes, rather than those who merely engage in activities purporting to deliver those outcomes. Those currently employed in healthcare are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer, to the detriment of our physical and mental health. And those incentives are to keep funding existing bodies and their approaches; as well, they encourage over-screening and over-diagnosis. 

It's time for a new approach. My suggestion is that rather than policymakers' focusing on the means by which they think good health can be achieved, they instead focus on targets for good physical and mental health, and provide incentives for people to achieve those targets. The Social Policy Bond concept, applied to health, would do this, and more: it would inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into all the processes necessary to improve a nation's health, regardless of the vested interests of the current service providers. A short piece on Health Bonds can be found here, and a much longer version, describing Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds is here. A bond regime would channel our scarce resources into the most efficient means of improving our health, including those currently neglected or not even considered by our current healthcare bodies. 

Health Bonds wouldn't stipulate how our health goals shall be achieved, nor who shall achieve them. This allows a broader approach. For example: if ticks are agreed to be a much bigger threat to health than mosquitos, then a bond regime would channel more resources into dealing with ticks rather than mosquitos. More broadly, our current narrow, short-term compartmentalised policy approach would not look into the positive health impacts of subsidising advanced courses for young drivers of motorbikes or cars. But holders of Health Bonds would look at such measures, investigate their possible health impacts, and make an informed decision as to whether any improvement they might bring to a population's health is worthwhile, compared to other possible interventions. 

Policymakers in general take the existing institutions, with their limited purview, as a given. An outcome-based approach, such as I envisage in a Social Policy Bond regime, would subordinate the composition, structures and all activities of institutions to the outcomes that policymakers target. For more on the new sorts of organisation that this approach would generate, please see here. 

Social Policy Bonds and price signalling

 One of the less obvious benefits of a Social Policy Bond regime arises from the price signalling of the market for the bonds. At flotation, the bonds would be auctioned, and difference between the sums raised at flotation and the total redemption value of the bonds would supply the market's best estimate of the cost of achieving the targeted goal at that time. This estimate would vary over time, depending on many factors including bondholders' performance in undertaking or financing goal-achieving projects. The market for Social Policy Bonds, then, as with all markets, plays a vital role not only in allocating resources but also in signalling to the bonds' backers the approximate costs of achieving social goals. The bonds' backers, that is, those who put up the funds for redeeming the bonds, could be in the public or private sectors: either way, this information is of great value. 

A competitive market for Social Policy Bonds would minimise the total cost of achieving a specified objective, as well as signalling it. More subtly, and more technically, it would also indicate the marginal cost of achieving further improvements. Say one million Crime Reduction Bonds issued by a local authority were to sell for $5 each. This would tell the issuing body that the present value of the expected maximum cost, including bondholders’ profits, of reducing the crime level from, say 50 to 40 units, would be $5 million. The local authority might then suppose that it could afford to be more ambitious, and aim for a further fall to 30 units. It could issue a million additional bonds redeemable when this new lower rate were reached. These would (probably) have an initial market value of less than $5, reflecting the (probably) diminishing returns involved in preventing crime. The point is that, by letting the market do the pricing of the bonds, the local authority would be getting an informed view of the marginal cost of its objectives. So if the bonds targeting the new level of 30 units were to sell for $4 each, then the maximum cost of achieving that objective would be $11 million, being equal to: $5 million (paid out when the level fell from 50 to 40 units) plus $6 million (paid out when the level fell from 40 to 30 units). The marginal cost of a 10-unit drop in crime would thus have been revealed to have risen from $5 million to $6 million. Should the local authority aim for a further fall to 20 units? Following such crime rate-targeting bond issues it would have robust information about the cost of doing so.

This is, of course, a simplified example and in fact the bond market would continuously update its pricing information. Say that new research, of the sort that might be stimulated by an initial bond issue targeting crime, suggested new ways of reforming or deterring criminals. Bondholders may, for example, have financed successful research into more effective reform programmes, or set up more appealing alternative lifestyles for especially hardened criminals. How would the market react to such developments? Once their effectiveness had been revealed, the value of all the bonds would rise. Instead of being priced at $5 and $4, the two crime reduction issues of the example might sell for $8 and $7. The total cost to the government of redeeming these bonds would not change: it would remain at $11 million (though redemption would most probably occur earlier). But the market would be generating new information as to the likely cost of future reductions in the crime rate. The market would now be expecting reductions of 10 units of crime to cost $2 million (from 50 to 40 units), and $3 million (from 40 to 30 units). The new research would have reduced the costs from $5 million and $6 million (respectively). So the cost of any further crime reductions would also fall, and by following market price movements policymakers could gauge approximately by how much. 

These figures are hypothetical, but they do indicate the role that markets for Social Policy Bonds could play in helping the government, and taxpayers, decide on their spending priorities. The market for the bonds is elegantly efficient in conveying information about the cost of achieving objectives and, crucially for policymakers, how this cost varies with time and circumstances. I discuss this in Chapter 5 of my book.

The system is corrupt

Two excerpts from recent readings:

In the Rostov region, in southern Russia, the owner of several stalls that sell local produce says she dreams of having her own fuel tanker. “They can all go to hell with their ideas and grand ambitions,” she says. “They” include Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, Emmanuel Macron and local governors. “We used to live just fine. Now all you do is scramble from one problem to the next.” Russians are growing anxious and angry, 'Economist', 8 July 2026

The SNP [Scottish National Party] has been winning by default for years now. Everyone knows the party is exhausted and out of ideas, but people keep voting for it for want of anything better. And, like Labour when it ruled Scotland, it never tries anything new. Why bother? The day before [Peter] Murrell’s sentencing, the party’s eight remaining Westminster MPs backed a presentation bill aimed at devolving independence referendum powers to Holyrood. These bills are highly unlikely to be passed. A futile gesture. Business as usual. Stealing from the SNP, Dani Garavelli, 'London Review of Books', 9 July 2026

The real political divide, I think, is not so much between left and right, or government and opposition, but between politicians and ordinary people. There are probably convincing psychoanalytical explanations for why those who pursue and attain power lose sight of whatever ideals they might have had, but more important is what we can do to close the gap between those with power and the people they are supposed to represent. Part of the reason for this gap is that we live in systems under which politicians can avoid being accountable for outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Instead they make vague, unverifiable promises, and their debates centre around funding arrangements, institutional structures, and legalisms. 

My thinking is that we need to re-orientate policy discussions and express policy goals in terms of long-term meaningful outcomes such as reduced crime rates, improvements in literacy, health and the environment. Ideally, too, we'd devise a way of channeling the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of these outcomes, and my suggestion is that we transition to a Social Policy Bond regime. This could be done gradually, Take health, for example. In the UK, central government provides funding for regional health authorities (for spending on doctors, hospitals and prescriptions) according mainly to
population level, age and need. Government also supplies funds directly to medical research organizations and academic institutions. A transition to a Social Policy Bond-based, rather than institution- or activity- based, funding programme would see the direct funding government gradually decline, while expenditure allocated by bondholders to the outcomes that all these institutions are collectively trying to achieve — longer life spans and a better quality of life, say — would gradually rise. Bondholders would face continuous incentives to make sure their funds are allocated only to those institutions with the most promising approaches to improving people's health. Those institutions could be already existing or new, public- or private-sector. There is more on how this sort of gradual transition can be achieved in Chapter 4 of my book, and more about applying the Social Policy Bond principle to health in the links on this page.

Someone understands the Social Policy Bond principle!

Kylie Mohr writes: 

As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking — and dangerous behavior, too. One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. ...Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said. Will betting on wildfires lead to arson?, Kylie Mohr, 29 June 2026

This is how Social Policy Bonds were conceived: define an uncertain future event and allow people to bet on whether it will occur or not. If enough people bet enough money, they will have an incentive to co-operate to make that event happen. Simple. Social Policy Bonds would target desirable social and environmental goals. Though some bondholders would be mere speculators, others would be motivated by the prospect of potential increases in the value of their bonds, to help achieve the targeted goal. The aim is to channel people's self-interest - their wish to win a bet - into improving society's well-being. Targeted goals have to be chosen carefully. A bond regime would show the most marked improvement over conventional policy when: goals are long term; when current policy is failing; and when diverse, adaptive approaches will be necessary. I've written about applying them to goals that fulfil all these criteria: including eliminating conflict, reducing crime, unemployment or climate change. Each goal must ideally be objectively verifiable. Though the non-tradeable variant of my idea is currently being implemented in about 25 countries, the original conception has yet to be tried. One possibility could be target for reduction the area of land lost to wildfire in, say, the United States, in one year....

Small wars and nuclear peace

The Economist writes about great power equilibrium: 

But for a balance of power to bring a new order it must do more than satisfy the two main actors. It must also bring stability to others or be flexible enough to encompass change. It must offer something of what Britain brought to 19th-century Europe through policies which sought to preserve the status quo by ensuring no country could dominate. Wars still happened, but their goal, as Henry Kissinger put it, was equilibrium, not total conquest. Unfortunately, as Dr [Francis] Fukuyama points out, using small wars to recalibrate the balance of power in a world studded with nuclear weapons will court catastrophe. How such a system could function is a mystery. America's wrecking-ball revolution, the 'Economist', 2 July 2026

Right; and small wars aren't going to stop happening any time soon. Does anybody seriously believe that there are there are systems in place that will effectively stop them becoming nuclear if one or other of the protagonists have the means to use them? We've been lucky, so far. The number of warheads has fallen from about 70000 since the Cold War, but there are now nine countries in possession of 12187 warheads, and those numbers are likely to increase. 

Consider the incentives on offer to those in power today: if they possess nuclear weapons they can initiate a conflict knowing that they can dictate its course by threatening, implicitly or otherwise, to deploy them. If the target of their aggression doesn't possess nuclear weapons or if the target cares more about its civilian population than the aggressor, then at some point our luck is likely to run out. It might be today, it might be in a few years, but the number of countries with nuclear weapons continues to proliferate and we should not have to rely on those in power to continue to exercise restraint at all times. The taboo against threatening use of nuclear weapons has been broken. It now appears inevitable that, before long, the taboo against their use will also be broken. Our political systems reward those most adept at acquiring power. Threatening the use of nuclear weapons is one way in which a regime can hold on to that power.

What can ordinary people - those of us who are content not to have the power to kill millions of human beings - do, faced with the realistic possibility that the nuclear taboo will be violated some time soon? My suggestion is that we issue Nuclear Peace Bonds. These bonds would be redeemable for a fixed sum only when a targeted array of indicators of peace had been achieved and sustained for a period of at least thirty years. They would reward those who do most to reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict. Backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists and ordinary people, they would encourage a variety number of diverse, adaptive peace-generating approaches. Some would inevitably fail; the way the market for the bonds would work means that these efforts would be terminated and resources diverted into more promising initiatives.

The effect of Nuclear Peace Bonds would be to give incentives to accelerate and guide our progress toward a less violent world more efficiently than has happened so far: a protracted, haphazard and bloody path that has given us a less violent world until now, but also one that has left us fearful of nuclear catastrophe. We can do better than that. By acknowledging that not all approaches are going to work, and supplying incentives for those that do, we can guide and accelerate evolutionary processes to bring about, as quickly and efficiently as possible, what is surely our one of our most urgent goals: sustained nuclear peace.

Defensive medicine

When adherence to process becomes more important than outcomes, it's time to complain. One example is the practice of defensive medicine: 

Between 60 and 90 percent of U.S. physicians report practicing defensive medicine, defined as the practice of ordering of tests, procedures, and other medical care solely to reduce the threat of malpractice liability.  This additional care has been estimated to cost the U.S. as much as $50 billion annually, and this likely underestimates the scope of the problem. Why do so many doctors practice defensive medicine? maybe because it works, Anupam B Jena et al, 16 May 2016 

'It works' in the title of that study does not mean that defensive medicine generates better health outcomes; rather: 

[It was found that] physicians with higher spending in a given year—in other words, the physicians who ordered more tests or procedures for the “typical” patients—were substantially less likely to be sued for a malpractice incident occurring the following year. Source, cited in the above paper, but not currently visible on the web)

Doctors are reacting rationally to the incentives on offer: they are liable for under-diagnosis, but not for over-diagnosis. The incentives aren't solely financial: in the UK 'the primary driver behind this trend [toward over-testing] often lies in a "better safe than sorry" mindset, coupled with a growing emphasis on preventive medicine.' (Source)

The problems caused by over-diagnosis are not limited to its waste of resources arising from unnecessary treatment and its adverse effects, and treatments that bring no benefit: there are also the psychological harms such as anxiety, stress, depression, and the burden of being unnecessarily labelled as having a disease. 

We need to rejig the incentives so they align with people's health. I suggest we explicitly target broad, meaningful indicators of national health and reward improvements in these indicators however they are achieved. Funding should be dictated by its expected benefits to people, rather than to liability lawyers. Resources should be directed to where they will achieve the maximum improvement in health per pound spent. Such improvement could be measured using such indicators as Quality Adjusted Life Years, longevity and an array of other measures. 

My suggestion, therefore, is that we apply the Social Policy Bond concept to health, and issue Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds (THOCs), which would provide incentives to research, develop and refine all approaches to improving our health, including measures that are currently thought to be beyond the remit of health authorities, but that could nevertheless generate large positive health improvements. Such measure might include measures as varied as better public transport for low-income households, subsidised apprenticeships, or lobbying for more controls on alcohol outlets. There are many other possibilities - but, currently,  few incentives to explore their potential health impacts. A bond regime would not assume that existing healthcare organisations are best placed to deliver all such impacts: it would encourage investors in the bonds to direct resources into any those approaches that promise to bring about the best improvements in health. My essay on THOCs is long, at 9500 words. A shorter version is here. 

Indirect greenhouse gases: why the 'root causes' approach isn't working

From the current New Scientist:

Of all the global warming that has happened since the pre-industrial era, about 15 per cent has been caused by emissions other than greenhouse gases, mainly carbon monoxide and VOCs [volatile organic chemicals]. ‘Forgotten’ pollutants cause warming, Alec Luhn, 'New Scientist', dated 20 June 2026

Some countries target emissions of these 'indirect greenhouse gases' indirectly, but most efforts aimed at reducing the rate of climate change are focused on carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that more directly affect the composition of the atmosphere. The same article tells us that black carbon (soot) is also excluded from these efforts and from national emissions data.  

The flaw in this approach - and it's a flaw that bedevils much environmental and social policy - is that in targeting a problem we try to identify its root causes and then aim to eliminate or attenuate them. But, as this example shows, when we are dealing with problems that have multiple causes and significant time lags, it's almost impossible to exhaustively identify these root causes. In this example, Mr Luhn points out that these indirect greenhouse gases plus black carbon are estimated to have contributed about  0.3°C of warming, which is quite significant. But there may be even more causes of climate change of which we are not aware. Indeed, a recent article in Nature highlights the hitherto unrecognised climate forcing contribution of micro- and nano-plastic particles. 

Which is why I advocate targeting the outcomes that we wish to see, rather than the supposed means of achieving them. Our knowledge of environmental and social relationships though, is always growing, and it makes more sense (to me) to recognise that we can't identify all the root causes and, rather than assume that we do and legislate accordingly, we should be encouraging people to keep researching into those root causes or to acknowledge that there might be more efficient ways of solving our problems than trying to find them. In the climate change example, we should be very clear about what we want to see: most probably, we'd want to see a range of physical, biological, ecological, social and financial measures of climate impacts to fall within an approved range for a sustained period. Why then, shouldn't we reward people for achieving that goal, rather than the alleged means of achieving it? In this example, again, it might be more efficient to look at solutions other than, or complementary to, reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Such approaches are being followed, but there is no coherent way of rewarding the most promising of them; nothing along the lines of the efforts to control emissions of those gases that fossilised science once told us contribute most to climate change. 

A Social Policy Bond regime, applied to climate change, would take that long-term view, and once we have clarified exactly what outcomes we wish to see, reward those who take steps to achieve them. A bond regime would reward the most cost-effective approaches and terminate those that are least promising. The same paradigm applies to other social and environmental approaches, especially those that are so complex that current policies are failing. 

For more about what I think about root causes, see here and here. For more about Social Policy Bonds in general see here; as applied to climate change see here.  

$3768 per second

There can't be many people who'd like to see a nuclear conflict but, with expenditures like this, it's increasingly likely that we'll see one:

In 2025, the nine nuclear-armed states spent just under $119 billion, or $3,768 per second, on their nuclear arsenals. [T]he combined spending of the nuclear armed states – China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK and US increased 19% from the previous year....Premeditated: 2025 global nuclear weapons spending, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), June 2026   

In 2025, at least 25 companies working on nuclear weapons development and maintenance held significant contracts for their work. These companies earned at least $38 billion in the year for nuclear weapons related activities and hold at least $394 billion in outstanding contracts. In 2025, new contracts worth around $2.5 billion were awarded to these companies. The companies identified in this report paid lobbyists in France and the United States more than $138 million to represent their interests last year. 2025 Nuclear Weapons Spending Reaches $119 billion, ICAN, June 2026

These sums represent a massive failure on the part of our species. A big part of the problem is that there's no obvious way in which ordinary people - the part of humanity that hopes nuclear weapons will never be used - can channel our wishes into opposing their continued development and deployment. There are bodies, such as ICAN, dedicated to campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but their resources are pitiful in comparison to the sums wielded by the companies working to develop them. The financial rewards to those companies, and the incentives to acquire them, vastly outweigh organised opposition to t heir deployment and use. Incentives are crucial and we need to offer meaningful and effective incentives for people to do everything they can to deter the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.     

What I propose is that we offer incentives for people to explore more ways of reducing the likelihood of nuclear conflict as efficiently as possible. I suggest that we put in place a system that encourages and rewards people for researching, refining and implementing the most promising activities that would ensure sustained nuclear peace. 

Nuclear Peace Bonds would be an ideal application of the Social Policy Bond concept, which is a way of rewarding the more efficient achievement social and environmental outcomes. In this instance, the targeted outcome could be nuclear peace sustained for thirty years. 'Nuclear peace' could be defined as something like 'the detonation of a nuclear device that directly kills more than 50 people' (with added provisos about any electromagnetic pulse effects). The bonds would reward those who achieve such a sustained period of nuclear peace, whoever they are and however they do so: only the outcome would be stipulated. For a short piece on how Nuclear Peace Bonds would work, please click here. For essays about applying the bonds to conflict in general, click here.

As well as pursuing activities the exact nature of which we cannot anticipate, investors in Nuclear Peace Bonds could do things that cannot be done by existing organisations, constrained as they are by precedent, and their perceived need to maintain their existence and so satisfy the bodies that fund them. So, for example, in today's world, nobody would have any incentive to bribe people close to decision makers in politics or the military to advocate nuclear disarmament. Likewise, an existing body is unlikely to try to get religious extremists to tone down their rhetoric, even if it believed that were the most efficient way of reducing the probability of nuclear conflict. The risk and consequences of exposure and backlash are too great for current institutions to bear. Holders of Nuclear Peace Bonds, however, would not be deterred from whatever actions they think most effective: funds to redeem their bonds could be held in escrow. Once nuclear peace had been achieved and sustained, their reward would be guaranteed. Nuclear Peace Bonds could run in parallel with existing efforts. Indeed, it's likely to channel more resources into those existing bodies whose activities are most promising. It would also encourage new approaches, the precise nature of which we cannot and need not know in advance.

A Nuclear Peace Bond regime would reward those who achieve peace, whoever they are and however they do so. It’s an admittedly novel approach, but the relevant question is 'what is the alternative?'. The Doomsday Clock is currently at 85 seconds to midnight....

Outcomes and accountability

George Monbiot writes about the UK:

Our entire political system is premised on the idea of accountability. Brilliant theory: just a shame it bears no relation to reality. Nothing sums up the death of accountability like the prospect of Nigel Farage in No10, 'the Guardian', 20 May 2026

Under the current system, people rarely monitor the distance between what politicians say and what they do. Even less frequently do we identify links between what they say and what actually happens. This is not just because of short attentions spans; it's also because society is far too complex for such relationships to be obvious. Things might have been different in the past, when there were fewer variables, fewer people, and time lags between a politician's statement and its consequences were shorter. Then, choosing between electoral candidates would have felt more meaningful, and politicians could be held more accountable. We became used to the idea of framing policy goals in terms of the ideas and personalities of the people who enunciated them. But those days are over, and people are now far more cynical not only about politicians, but about elections and democracy itself. 

To change this, I suggest that we frame policy in terms of broad outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people, rather than, as now, funding arrangements, institutional structures and legalisms. So, instead of politicians focusing on where society's scarce resources should go, they would instead concentrate on things that, in democratic countries, they are actually good at: articulating society's wishes and raising the revenue for their achievement. Under a Social Policy Bond regime, investors in the bonds who would decide how our goals would be best achieved. They would be constantly motivated to find the most efficient ways of doing so. The bonds, being tradable, could target long-term goals, so that holders need not hold them to redemption to benefit from any increase in value that would arise from their working to make the goals' being achieved more quickly. The bonds would channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into solving our social and environmental problems. By focusing on broad, meaningful outcomes, our policymaking would be more transparent and bring about more public engagement in the process. There'd be more buy-in, less blaming and less cynicism. The role of politicians would change; they'd be more concerned with society's wishes, and less with power: they'd have effectively contracted out the achievement of social goals to bodies beyond their control. As well as the greater efficiency with which our goals would be achieved, the people attracted to politics would be less driven by the possibility of exercising power while overseeing process, and more by representing the informed views of their constituents as to the social and environmental outcomes they wish to see. 

Complexity

James C Scott writes:  

[T]he very strength of scientific agricultural experimentation— its simplifying assumptions and its ability to isolate the impact of a single variable on total production—is incapable of dealing adequately with certain forms of complexity. It tends to ignore, or discount, agricultural practices that are not assimilable to its techniques. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, (Chapter 8), 1998

As in agriculture, so with society and the environment. Society is too complex for simplistic goals, such as maximising food production, necessarily to improve net societal well-being. We'd do better to target the outcomes we wish to see, rather than the supposed means of getting there. In a Social Policy Bond regime, we might ignore 'agricultural policy' (notoriously inefficient and corrupt) and explicitly target broader goals as the physical health of the population. Subsidising farmers might be one way of getting there, but it would be up to bondholders to work out whether there are more efficient ways of achieving that goal. (There probably are.) Societal complexity has risen hugely since relatively simple goals and policies could adequately anticipate all its variables and time lags, and their effects on well-being. 

Social Policy Bonds would target the outcomes we wish to see, rather than the alleged means of reaching them. As well as efficiency and transparency about what government is trying to achieve, other advantages of a bond regime would arise from its ability to target long-term goals, and so encourage research, experimentation and refinement of a diverse and adaptive array of approaches to solutions to our social and environmental problems. Though the concept has been in the public arena for decades, it  hasn't advanced very far. I think this is partly because the left doesn't like anything to do with markets and elements of the right doesn't want to think in terms of government intervention of any sort (though a bond regime would shrink the role of politicians). Most institutions of any sort, public- or private-sector, are mainly concerned with self-perpetuation, and would fell threatened by Social Policy Bonds, which would prioritise efficiency most of all.  

Misaligned incentives

Tadeusz Patzek writes: 

Humans did not unknowingly create climate breakdown; they proceeded with eyes open, repeatedly prioritizing immediate growth over long-term habitability. The subsequent failure to restrain fossil-fuel use was therefore not a failure of science, measurement, or foresight; it was a failure of political economy. Decision-makers understood that the benefits of fossil-fuel expansion were immediate, concentrated, and readily monetized, while the damages were delayed, diffuse, probabilistic, and politically externalizable, and that institutional power flowed toward those who maximized short-term growth. Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100, Tadeusz W Patzek, February 2026 (This is a preprint available for free download from here. My ellipses indicate citations.)

The last sentence sums up much of the human predicament. Most of us, including policymakers, are offered incentives that reward short-term thinking. There are few financial incentives that would reward such crucial goals such as the survival of humanity. Too much human ingenuity is channelled into activities that, given the urgency of our challenges, are trivial or worse. 

Social Policy Bonds are an attempt to re-orientate the incentives, to encourage solutions to our urgent, long-term problems. They aim to inject the market's incentives and efficiencies into the achievement of such outcomes as disaster prevention, conflict reduction, nuclear peace or climate stability. Historically, at the national level, such outcomes have been neglected, or have been the subject of ad hoc arrangements. At the global level, the resources available to the dedicated staff of NGOs working for peace, for example, are orders of magnitude lower than those that would adequately reflect the diffuse wishes of humanity. A bond regime would divert funds into the most efficient of these organisations, allowing them not just to raise the salaries of their employees, but to attract more expertise and more resources. 

Foreign billionaires: the real beneficiaries of agricultural policy

Government's involvement in agriculture in the rich countries has a long history. Its subsidies, originally well intentioned and (to some extent) rational, have created powerful interests that resist change. They've led to farming at an intensity that degrades the soil, water, and animal welfare. One of their - stated - aims was to preserve the family farm, which they haven't done. They are capitalised into farmland values, making entry into agriculture almost impossible for those who don't inherit. They raise food prices, while barriers to food imports stifle the prospects of food-rich developing countries and transfer money from taxpayers and consumers to the wealthy: 

UAE’s ruling royal family benefits from more than €71m in EU farming subsidies

The United Arab Emirates’ ruling royal family is benefiting from tens of millions in EU subsidies to grow crops destined for the Gulf, it can be revealed. A cross-border investigation by DeSmog and shared with the Guardian found subsidiaries controlled by the Al Nahyans collected more than €71m (£61m) in six years for farmland it controls in Romania, Italy and Spain. The Al Nahyan family is the second richest in the world, with an estimated wealth of more than $320bn (£235bn), mostly derived from the Emirates’ vast oil reserves. Subsidies under the common agricultural policy (Cap) make up a third of the EU’s entire budget, paying out about €54bn each year to farmers and rural areas across the bloc. UAE’s ruling royal family benefits from more than €71m in EU farming subsidies, Clare Carlile, 'The Guardian', 7 May 2026

These subsidies have been widely challenged for decades (I wrote about them in 2001), but still they continue....

All of which points to the need to be very clear about what are the actual intentions of government policy. If, for instance, it's to achieve self-sufficiency in food production, then we need to look beyond outputs to inputs - especially oil. If it's to help smaller farmers, then target the incomes of small farmers, rather than subsidise land ownership. If it's to raise the cost of food so as enrich billionaires, then come clean and tell us that that is your intention. 

A Social Policy Bond regime would oblige policymakers to be clear about the outcomes they wish to see. This should be a starting point for all policies, in contrast to today, where stated intentions are vague, incoherent, uncosted and deceptive. Politicians can get away with such obfuscation because we are used to policies being framed in terms of funding arrangements, legalisms and institutional structures. The connections between what politicians say, what they do, and outcomes are too obscure to be identified. A bond regime, though, would have explicit, verifiable goals, which the public could help prioritise and with which ordinary citizens could engage - necessary to generate buy-in to policies that invariably create losers as well as winners. Transparency, efficiency and buy-in are just some of the advantages of a Social Policy Bond regime, about which there is much more on SocialGoals.com. 

Aim for nuclear peace first

PANews reports: 

In April 2026, a hair dryer was used to heat a meteorological sensor at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, causing abnormal temperature spikes. The attacker exploited rule vulnerabilities in Polymarket's prediction market, winning $34,000 in prizes. Polymarket relies on a single data source and does not revise data after settlement, making physical intervention possible. After the incident was exposed, Polymarket quietly changed the data source without publicly acknowledging the vulnerability. This is known as a 'physical oracle attack,' with low cost but high returns. A hair dryer "blew" $34,000 away from Polymarket, PANews, 23 April 2026

Campbell's Law states that as soon as you use a specific number to judge people's success, people will start "gaming the system" to make that number look good, even if it ruins the actual quality of the work. The hairdryer is a relatively trivial example; a more serious one is 'teaching to the test'. It's a problem that afflicts current policymakers and could, potentially, derail a Social Policy Bond regime, which depends entirely on the definition and targeting of quantitative variables. A solution would be to target goals that are, or are inextricably lined to, what we actually want to achieve. This could be made to work well for bonds that target broad goals at a highly aggregated level and in the long term. Take literacy: if we want to see improvements in the literacy of, say, 7-year old children in a country over the next decade, we could sample children of that age over a wide area, waiting until the end of the decade to take the sample. Nobody would know in advance the identity of those children, so only a genuine improvement in the national literacy level of 7-year olds would signify that the goal had been achieved. 

A current preoccupation of mine is the urgent need for conflict reduction. Coming up with a range of indicators that we could target for world peace, or even regional (such as the Middle East) peace could be done: I envisage an array of indicators, including: numbers of people killed directly by conflict; people seriously maimed; people made homeless; expenditure on weaponry; numbers in armed forces; numbers of schoolbooks inciting hatred; and many others. All these indicators could be debated, then rigorously defined for targeting purposes. This would take time, but would be worth doing, given the payoffs that we would target, such as peace in the world (or region) sustained for at least thirty years. But simpler, and only slightly less ambitious, would be to target nuclear peace: detection of a nuclear explosion is a relatively simple matter: from Wikipedia:

There are many different ways to detect a nuclear detonation, these include seismic, hydroacoustic, and infrasound detection, air sampling, and satellites. They have their own weaknesses and strengths, as well as different utilities. Each has been used separately, but at present the best results occur when data is used in tandem, since the energy caused by an explosion will transfer over to different mediums. Source

I've written about Nuclear Peace Bonds here. I'd hope that, once nuclear peace were targeted, we could then begin the more arduous work on defining exactly what we'd want World Peace Bonds or, say, Middle East Peace Bonds to target. 

Documenting conflict isn't helping

Author and Middle East correspondent, Charles Glass, writes about the current conflict in Lebanon:  

I hear and sometimes see this war, but I’m not covering it. What good would it do? You, dear reader, don’t give a damn. Nor do the Israeli invaders, their American enablers or Hizbullah’s aspiring martyrs. ...Would anything I write compel the arms dealers and ultra-high-tech digital warfare providers to deprive their managers and shareholders of the profits accruing from their wizard new methods of taking human life? Like the rest of Lebanon, I wake in the night at the sound of every loud bang, unsure whether it is thunder, an Israeli naval shell, a drone explosion or a jet dropping a two-thousand-pound bomb to destroy an entire city block. Diary: Beirut, now and then, Charles Glass, 'London Review of Books', 23 April 2026

It's a sad fact that writing about conflicts, and even showing gruesome videos, does little to stop them. Such documentation cannot oppose the formidable coalition of 'warfare providers' on the other side: the arms merchants, the ideologues, the religious zealots and all their corrupt or gullible hangers-on. Most of us don't want any of that. But the politicians' relentless focus on the short term means that ceasefires and truces are merely pauses in the action that allow parties to stoke resentments and re-arm. A lasting peace is more likely to be a just peace, and we need to create a constituency that is rewarded for achieving it. 

World Peace Bonds, or a variant of more modest focus, could be the solution. They would reward a sustained absence of conflict: I suggest a minimum period of thirty years. This long-term focus would encourage investors in the bonds to research, experiment and refine approaches to ending conflict. Such activities would probably include sparing the next generation the neuroses and resentments of their parents - something that good people are doing nowadays (see here, for example), but with a pitifully limited  command of resources. A bond regime would channel funding and expertise into the most promising of these activities. If financed by philanthropists, with contributions from NGOs and the public, it could bypass politicians whose narrow short-termism does much to keep conflict going. 

World peace is an ambitious goal, about which I have written here, with my book on the subject available here (downloads are free of charge). More modest goals about which I have also written include Middle East Peace Bonds and Nuclear Peace Bonds.