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.