It's difficult to write about social problems when war looms so large, especially the possibility of nuclear conflict. Even global environmental concerns like climate change, or the destruction of fishing grounds, would fade into the background if the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons were ever to be broken. I've written copiously about the sustained nuclear peace, urged the issuing of Nuclear Peace Bonds to achieve it, mainly because the need for it is so great, but also because it would make an ideal target for a Social Policy Bond regime:
- Existing policies don't appear to be doing anything to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear conflict;
- Nuclear peace sustained for at least 30 years is the sort of long-term goal that will require a lot of groundwork with many different approaches that will need winnowing out to find the most promising;
- Verifying whether the goal has been achieved would be easy;
- The range of possible approaches is big, and there are complexities and feedback loops that make conventional policymaking, limited as it is by the imaginations and time horizons of its practitioners, useless; diverse, adaptive approaches are needed; and
- There are few financial incentives to those people or organisations trying, or pretending to be trying, to achieve nuclear peace.
The last of these requires some explanation: financial incentives are not solely about making the people who work for nuclear peace better off (which is not in itself an ignoble outcome), but also about attracting resources into what is currently a policy goal as unglamorous as it is urgent and necessary. With more funding, organisations working to achieve nuclear peace could employ more people and more resources, giving them a better chance of advancing the goal.
All my work on Nuclear Peace Bonds and, more broadly, conflict reduction, can be found via this page. It is all available free of charge, including the text of my book on World Peace Bonds, though printed copies can also be purchased.
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