Politics as career drama

There's much that's worthy of quote in Greg Jackson's latest article in Harper's Magazine, but I will limit myself to this for now:

As things are, the job of politicians is to feed the emotional-entertainment industry that we call “news,” which is accomplished by grandstanding and self-promotion. Reporters and pundits cover politics by analyzing how politicians succeed and fail as spokespeople and media figures. Interest shifts, by turns, to how the game is played, how the media fits into this game, and, eventually, how journalists do their jobs. The news today, properly understood, is about the careers of politicians and journalists. It is career drama. (My italics) Vicious Cycles, Greg Jackson, 'Harper's Magazine', dated January 2020

In the absence of any more meaningful measure of politicians' competence, we focus on how they appear in the media. But what else can we do? The links between what politicians say, what they mean, and what actually happens are tenuous, obscure or non-existent. Only rarely can we say that this politician did something that led to that outcome. Society is just too complex to identify cause and effect with certainty. There are exceptions: decisions to go to war, for instance. But for the most part, when wondering whom to vote for we depend on the news or, as Mr Jackson accurately puts it, "news".

When seeing the wide, and widening, gap between politicians and ordinary citizens, we are right to draw attention to the baleful influence of the wealthy organisations - public- and private-sector - who, along with their lobbyists, are the only people that have the time and motivation to understand how policy is made and how they can manipulate it for their own benefit. If only there were a means by which we could make politicians enact policies that benefit the people they are supposed to represent.

Social Policy Bonds are one such means. You might have heard of Social Impact Bonds, which are the non-tradeable version of my original (long pdf, scroll to page 266) idea. There are several reasons why I think we need the bonds to be tradeable if they are going to make significant gains in policy effectiveness and efficiency. I write about those reasons here and here. The important point is that the bonds reward outcomes: outcomes, moreover, that are meaningful to ordinary people and which, in fact, ordinary people can help identify and prioritise. Because Social Policy Bonds are tradeable they can target long-term goals, whose pathway to achievement is unclear. We can therefore target remote goals, such as universal literacy or world peace, because we do not have to specify in advance how those goals shall be best achieved, nor whom we shall charge with achieving them. The market for the bonds would ensure that only the most efficient projects will be rewarded. The long-term nature of the bonds means that investors will have incentives to research a wide range or initiatives, and persist only with the most efficient.

Our biggest, most urgent challenges - such as climate change or conflict reduction - will require a mosaic of diverse, adaptive projects. These are exactly the sorts of projects that government at any level implement. The top-down approach is good for articulating society's wishes, and for raising the revenue for their achievement, but when it comes to actually achieving any but the most obvious goals - the ones with the clearest link between cause and effect - it fails. A Social Policy Bond regime would see politicians doing what they do well: helping society define its goals and raising taxes. But it would contract out the achievement of these goals to more motivated investors, who have a sustained interest in achieving their goals - which are exactly the same as those of society. Economic theory and all the evidence tell us that competitive markets are the most efficient way of allocating scarce resources to achieve prescribed ends. Under a Social Policy Bond regime it is society that would determine these ends, and market forces would channel the market's incentives and efficiencies into achieving them.

Give up control over the 'how'

Joseph O'Neill looks at US politics and how wealthy left/'liberal' donors' support differs from their conservative counterparts' in the US:

[T]he liberal political apparatus is “largely guided by the moral whims of rich people.” ...Liberal megadonors with private foundations are reluctant to invest in uncharismatic, long-haul grassroots projects. They are typically afraid of appearing “political.” Instead, they favor ameliorating the plight of the visibly needy ... [whereas] right-wing donors have spent their money more productively. They have created and supported entities (the American Legislative Exchange Council, ... the State Policy Network, Americans for Prosperity, the Federalist Society, etc.) dedicated to developing durable structures of power and fanaticism. No More Nice Dems, Joseph O’Neill, 'The New York Review of Books', dated 19 December

I'm not sure about either strategy. Well, I am sure they work for the donors, and there's an argument that the left already has much of the media, schools and universities in their grip anyway, and not only in the US: it doesn't have to create new ones. To quote Thomas Sowell:

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. Thomas Sowell, 'The Survival of the Left', in The Thomas Sowell Reader, 2011

But the point is that the wealthy donors of neither the left nor right seem to care about outcomes. They fund glamorous, high-profile projects or buildings, foundations, think-tanks. They lobby government. They have in common that, even if they genuinely wish to improve the well-being of certain groups, they won't target the outcomes that those people most care about. Why not? Because, I think, in this respect donors resemble politicians and bureaucrats: they will not willingly relinquish control. They think they know how best to achieve results, or they want everyone to associate them with identifiable buildings, institutions or ideas - whether they do any long term good or not.


Social Policy Bonds are a means by which the wealthy could both articulate society's wishes and channel funds into satisfying those wishes, without actually doing the work themselves. Rich philanthropists could, instead, reward the achievement of our goals, without dictating who shall achieve them nor how they shall be achieved. They would still have the power to articulate these goals but, under a bond regime, they would have to relinquish the control over how these goals are to be achieved. That would be probably be difficult for billionaires to accept. But to address our most serious problems we need diverse, adaptive solutions, with time horizons longer than those of individual lifetimes. 

As a species, we now have massive potential to solve those problems that have bedevilled mankind for millennia: war, for instance, poverty, illiteracy, disease. Social Policy Bonds are a means by which we could motivate people toward solving these problems. Governments, unfortunately, aren't likely to be the first to issue them. They owe too much to existing career paths, methods, and institutions. But billionaires? They could be more amenable to persuasion. They want to see the right thing done. All it would take is a bit of humility on their part so that they don't feel they have to be the ones doing it. 'Letting go' of the need for acknowledgement and short-term results, could be as helpful to society as letting go of emotional hurts can be to the individual.

Improve healh by spending less on health care

Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal gets it:

Another common mistake is to confuse health care and health. Health care accounts for perhaps 10% of health. Income is the main determinant of health. Spending more on health care crowds out spending on things like housing, education, the environment and benefits, which are more important for health. The NHS doesn’t need more money, it needs a radical rethink. Richard Smith, Letters to the editor, the 'Economist', 7 December

Exactly. The best, most efficient way, of achieving our health goals is not necessarily to spend more on healthcare, just as the best way of reducing crime might not be to spend more on policing. In health, as in other policy areas, suffers from its inherently uniform, top-down approach, heavily influenced by large corporations. Government can also be short term in its thinking, reactive rather than proactive, and disdainful of innovation while favouring tried, tested but failed approaches. It has to make its resource allocation decisions on the basis of data that are necessarily incomplete. How can it know in detail the effect that spending on, say, sophisticated ultrasonic diagnostics will have on the overall health of the nation, as compared with nudging us to floss our teeth daily?

Health expenditure is influenced by groups of medical specialists with little incentive or capacity to see improvements in the overall health of a large population as an objective. Funding decisions are also heavily influenced by the public profile of a disease or its victims, rather than on what would best meet the needs of society. As Dr Smith says, health is also a function of housing, income, education and the environment, as well as more factors such as diet, and exercise. Research shows the beneficial effects on health of green spaces in our cities (see here (pdf) for instance). The way government is currently structured, with its discrete funding bodies all being lobbied by the medical industry, makes it unlikely that such difficult-to-quantify benefits will influence funding decisions.

We cannot expect a government nor any single organisation to identify the huge numbers of variables, with all their time lags and interactions, that influence the nation’s health. We can, though, devise a system that rewards people who explore and implement the most cost-effective health solutions, even when circumstances and knowledge are changing continuously. I have tried to do this with my essay on Health Bonds, which would aim to distribute scarce government funds to where they would do most good, as measured by such indicators as Quality Adjusted Life Years.

By issuing Health Bonds, government would reward successful initiatives for improving health regardless of how these initiatives work or who implements them. Government would still articulate society's broad desired health outcomes, and still raise the revenue for their achievement. But it would contract out the achievement to motivated investors in a way that rewards success, and only success. Health Bonds, would stimulate diverse, adaptive ways of achieving goals, in ways that we cannot anticipate, and that could well entail dealing with problems such as those identified by Dr Smith. 

It's worth investing in nuclear peace

There's very little to cheer about here:

As China makes its nuclear forces more credible—less vulnerable to pre-emption, and more likely to get through missile defences—America grows nervous, argues Caitlin Talmadge of Georgetown University. If America cannot hope to destroy most of China’s missiles, then it cannot easily threaten China with a nuclear strike without putting its own cities at risk. American policymakers worry this will embolden China and unnerve American allies like Taiwan and Japan.... Chinese officials are overconfident about their ability to prevent a conventional war from turning nuclear, they argue, while American ones are overconfident about their subsequent ability to keep a nuclear war limited in scope. Making things worse, the two countries lack a dedicated nuclear dialogue, largely because China is wary of giving away too much information. China’s nuclear arsenal was strikingly modest, but that is changing, the 'Economist', 23 November

The stakes here are enormous, but we are proceeding haphazardly toward an unknown, perhaps catastrophic, destination. There are people and resources aimed at minimising the risk of nuclear conflict but I think there are too few, given the potential for calamity. Unfortunately, we have no way, under our current national and supranational political systems, to channel more resources - more effective resources, that is - into minimising the risk of nuclear conflict.

Actually, the goal of sustained nuclear peace makes an ideal target for the Social Policy Bond idea. One, because it's a complex, long-term goal that will require diverse, adaptive solutions. Two, it's an easy goal to verify. And lastly, it's a goal that, on all the evidence, including that of the Economist article, is unlikely to be reached under current policy.

My proposal would be to issue bonds that reward a sustained period of nuclear peace. This could be defined, as, say the non-detonation of a nuclear device that kills more than 50 people for 30 years. They could be backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists and members of the public. With sufficient backing the bonds would help offset and (one hopes) outweigh the the incentives currently on offer, which essentially are those of the military and weapons manufacturers to maintain a nuclear posture.

Those billions of us who would benefit from nuclear peace are presumably a massive numerical majority, but we have few means of channel our wishes effectively. The tendency is to assume that governments will do what's necessary, with the support of hard-working, well-intentioned people in the private sector. But the rewards to all these people are not linked to their success. This is unhelpful in itself but, more importantly, it discourages investors who, seeing little opportunity to benefit from working to reduce nuclear conflict, will focus instead of less edifying enterprises. Most important of all is that our current strategy is just not working.

We need to reward those who achieve nuclear peace at least as much as those working to undermine it. We don't know exactly how to reduce the chances of a nuclear exchange, nor who will be best placed to do so, over the long period during which our goal is to be achieved, but we have no excuse for not encouraging people to find out. Nuclear Peace Bonds would apply the Social Policy Bond principle to this goal. Investors in the bonds would form a protean coalition of people dedicated to achieving it as efficiently as possible. Their goal would be exactly the same as society's. Human ingenuity knows no limits. Currently, too much of it is devoted to relatively unimportant or socially questionable goals. Nuclear Peace Bonds would channel our ingenuity, and stimulate more of it, into minimising the risk of a global catastrophe.

My short piece on Nuclear Peace Bonds is here. The links in the right-hand column of that page point to papers on similar themes: Conflict Reduction, Disaster Prevention, and Middle East Peace

Effective policy needs experiments

Long-term, remote goals, such as universal literacy, the ending of war, or the elimination of poverty in developing countries, will require a range of solutions, varying over time and space, for their achievement. Conventional approaches to large-scale, complex problems rarely rely on hard evidence. Too often we read about the supposed 'root causes' of, for instance, violence being poverty and violence, with little supporting evidence. Sure, in some circumstances, tackling such alleged root causes might be the most efficient way of solving a problem. But in others such faith might be misplaced, or even counterproductive. Even Social Impact Bonds are limited when it comes to large-scale, remote goals, because they are inherently short term in nature, and don't allow for new entrants into the problem-solving services. (See here and here for why I am ambivalent about SIBs.)
 
Social Policy Bonds are different. Because they're tradeable, they can target long-term goals whose achievement might take years beyond the planning horizon of  investors. This allows bondholders to benefit from copious research aimed at finding, and funding, only the most efficient initiatives.

This sort of research and experimentation in matters of policy is rarely encouraged or rewarded, so I'm pleased that this year's Nobel prize for economics was awarded to three economists, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, who used experiments to look at approaches to health care, education and entrepreneurship.

In the mid-1990s Mr Kremer ...began studying poverty with methods more commonly associated with chemists and biologists: randomised trials. If human capital—health, education, skills and so forth—is essential for development, then economists had better make sure they understand where it comes from. In Kenya he conducted field experiments in which schools were randomly divided into groups, some subject to a policy intervention and others not. He tested, among other things, additional textbooks, deworming treatments and financial incentives for teachers linked to their pupils’ progress. .... Educational resources—textbooks, say—turned out to do little for learning outcomes. Making pupils healthier improved their attendance, but did not necessarily mean they learned more. The experiments had a larger result, however: they taught the economics profession that randomised trials could work in the field. A Nobel economics prize goes to pioneers in understanding poverty, the 'Economist', 17 October

Right: they can work if the incentives are there to conduct them. The governments of all too many countries seldom think of offering such incentives. Philanthropists sometimes do, though (see here for example). They could take the lead in issuing Social Policy Bonds for the big, urgent goals that existing bodies are too small, too selfish or too incompetent to target effectively. See here for my piece on Social Policy Bonds published by a journal for philanthropists.

It's all about outcomes

From Harper's Magazine: 

Percentage of [US] Democratic voters who cite a personal characteristic as the most important factor in selecting a president : 28 
Who cite a policy consideration : 27

Harper's Index, Harper's Magazine, November, derived from Pew Research Center (Washington).

What could we expect? Policymaking is so removed from ordinary people that we have little else to go on, other than what can be seen in the media. We choose our politicians according to their perceived personality. Promises, rhetoric come into it but outcomes? Not at all. This isn't specific to the US. The gap between policymakers and the public grows ever wider. We focus on crises in the same way as we choose our politicians: according to their profile in the media. Slow-moving, complex crises, like climate change or the ballooning of public and private debt, deteriorate over the years, until they manifest themselves unequivocally forms that can be covered in a short news bulletin. There's an inevitability about this, and it's perfectly explicable in a world in which we are bombarded by information. But it is not efficient, because resources are devoted to avoiding images of failure, rather than actual failure. Serious but non-visual crises, as we have seen in finance and the environment, slowly and undramatically gather pace until their effects become unavoidable. By that time, of course, it might be too late to do much about them, even with enormous quantities of spending.

A Social Policy Bond regime could be different. It would target society's social and environmental goals, such as dealing with climate change, extending nuclear peace, the mitigation of any sort of human catastrophe, however caused. We need to be given the chance to express our political views in the form of desirable outcomes, rather than in terms of personality.

The new caste system

 Michael Hobbes writes:

“The sense that there’s a self-​sustaining and self-​dealing group at the top isn’t wrong,” Reeves said. “When you create a ‘meritocratic’ selection process where the production of merit is increasingly skewed by parental income, you end up with a hereditary meritocracy.” The 'Glass Floor' Is Keeping America's Richest Idiots At The Top, Michael Hobbes, 'Huffington Post', 13 October

True, but what is a meritocracy in one set of circumstances becomes something different when history moves on. What happens to what was (perhaps) a meritocracy is exactly what happens to any other organisation when faced with significantly changing circumstances: it begins to devote its time and energy to self-perpetuation rather than its stated, original, goals. Every organisation does it: be it a government body, a trade union, church or university. In the private sector too, large corporations, especially monopolies, find it more expedient to spend their time stifling competition and manipulating the regulatory environment to favour big, established firms like themselves. So I would not use the phrase 'hereditary meritocracy' to describe our ruling class: rather 'hereditary elite'. A caste, in fact.

We are beginning to see the result: a self-entrenching elite. In the English-speaking world (and perhaps beyond) we have a bifurcated society, in which those whose parents own property can aspire to own property, and those whose parents don't own property have very little chance of ever being able to buy a house, however hard working they might be.

Inequality in Britain is “now entrenched from birth to work”, according to a damning report by the government’s social mobility commission[.] Social mobility in UK 'virtually stagnant' since 2014, Richard Adams, the 'Guardian', 30 April

Part of the problem is that we have government of the people, by the people rich, and for the people rich. And one reason for that is that our policymaking processes are so obscure and protracted that only the rich (or their employees) have the means or capacity to follow it closely and thereby influence it. Ordinary people are alienated from the decisions that affect our lives.

One of the two underlying principles of the Social Policy Bond idea is that we - that is, society - should target goals that are meaningful to ordinary people; goals that we can understand and with which we can identify. So instead of politicians making themselves feel important by spending hours tinkering with various bodies' funding and regulatory arrangements, they would concentrate on articulating society's goals and raising the revenue for their achievement: things that government is actually quite good at. The achievement of these goals, on the other hand, is best done via a market. In economic theory, and on all the evidence, markets are the most efficient way of allocating society's scarce resources. By issuing Social Policy Bonds, government could target long-term, ambitious goals, without having to think about how to achieve them. That means, of course, that it would relinquish its power to decide who receives funding, and that is the sticking point. People rarely surrender power voluntarily.

So perhaps the more likely vehicle for the Social Policy Bond idea will be driven by philanthropists. I've tried to reach them, but so far without success.

We don't like being held in contempt

Concluding their study of daily life in colonial Latin America, Ann Jefferson and Paul Lokken write of the conflict between the Roman Catholic Church  and those advocates of political and economic liberalism associated with Enlightenment thinking:

Conservative leaders often succeeded in rallying support for their program from native peoples and other marginalized members of society because liberal advocates of  “progress,” much like Spain’s “enlightened” Bourbon reformers in the late 18th century, generally made clear their disdain for the supposedly backward aspects of popular culture. Daily Life in Colonial Latin America, Ann Jefferson and Paul Lokken, August 2011

I think the authors are onto something here; something that applies as much to today's politics in western democracies as those of 200 years ago in the newly independent countries of Latin America. In the absence of a policymaking system that engages ordinary people, we react emotionally to the candidates and parties on offer. When we sense disdain from a political party, we vote for the other lot. The smugness of elites can be seen across the entire range of the spectrum, and our reaction to that combination of condescension and contempt explains much of contemporary politics.

We need a policymaking system that encourages us to further our understanding of the policy choices on offer - not the personalities, the sound-bites, the images or the rhetoric. We can do this by formulating those choices in terms of outcomes: outcomes that are meaningful to all of us; outcomes that we can understand and put into some order or priority.

Social Policy Bonds are one way in which we can specify such outcomes, and have people vote for those they support. A bond regime would be a way of bypassing the neuroses and insecurities of the people in power and those who manipulate them. By targeting outcomes with which people can identify Social Policy Bonds could bring about more public participation in the policymaking process. That is an end in itself (see here (pdf) for example), as well as a means by which decisions become acceptable even to those who opposed them. Importantly too, there's more consensus about outcomes than about the supposed means of achieving them. A bond regime would focus policy debate on our social and environmental goals, and which ones shall be prioritised. The process itself would generate more mutual understanding and less of the anger and contempt that are such a feature of today's policymaking

As well, a bond regime would encourage us to think long term: our goals are far more stable than the ways in which we think we can best achieve them. They are also more transparent as would be their funding. Corporations, their lobbyists and the people in power whom they influence all have an interest in obscuring how funds are allocated, and in failing to monitor whether policies succeed or fail (see Why States Believe Foolish Ideas: Non-Self Evaluation by States and Societies, by Stephen Van Evera (pdf)). With government, big business and now, increasingly, the judiciary determining our economic and social environment, what hope is there for the rest of us? The gap between ruler and ruled is becoming ever wider. Social Policy Bonds could help close it.

For general information about Social Policy Bonds see here. For more about Social Policy Bonds and buy-in see here.

They've weaponised complexity

When people's wishes clash with vested interests it's the vested interests (aka 'the deep state') that win every time. Our political systems are too complex, arcane or corrupt for ordinary people to stand a chance. One result is obvious: ever-rising income and wealth inequality. It's been seen as a problem for years, but where are we now? From yesterday's New York Times:

[T]he 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data. The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You, David Leonhardt, 'New York Times', 6 October

It's not only the US. Here Martin Lukacs writes about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

In late 2018, this avowed friend of labor legislated away the right to strike of a postal union that wanted safer working conditions; this champion of equality gave profitable multinational corporations giant hand-outs, maintaining multibillion-dollar subsidies to oil companies and granting $10.5 billion in tax breaks on the heels of similar measures by Trump; and this advocate of women’s rights set a record selling weapons to the theocratic, patriarchal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, even as their war on Yemen escalated. Private wealth continued to soar, without any discernible benefit to the public good. Much-needed universal social programs like childcare or the extension of healthcare to cover the costs of medicines in Canada—which are the second highest of any country—never materialized. Justin Trudeau, Liberal Let-Down, Martin Lukacs, NYR daily, 7 October

Voting makes little difference. And, while we don't really know the intentions of the people in power, I suspect that whoever they are doesn't make much difference either. The vested interests are too powerful. They have perpetuated a policymaking process that effectively excludes influence from people outside their exalted circle. They have weaponised the complexity and obscurity of our systems of government for selfish ends.

They can get away with this because our political discourse centres on sound-bites, personality, and image. Actual policymaking is an entirely distinct process: much of it focuses on the structures and funding of government bodies, law and regulation; all of which are opaque to non-professionals - which is to say, ordinary people. The public. The rest of us. The only people who now really understand policymaking are those who are paid to do so, and the only people who influence it are those who have the millions of dollars necessary to pay them.You might even think the system has been specifically designed to keep ordinary citizens out of it.

So I suggest that policymaking instead focus on outcomes, rather than the alleged means of achieving them. Outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people, so that we can engage with discussion about them, their funding, their relative importance. Such discussion would be more accessible than current policymakers' emphasis on legal pathways, funding arrangements, institutional structures and composition, and other arcana.

Meaningful outcomes: they form one essential element of the Social Policy Bond idea. The other is the injection of market incentives into their achievement: rewarding those who achieve our goals according to their efficiency in actually achieving them. The idea might sound outlandish at first hearing: handing over the solution of our social and environmental problems to investors. But our goals would be discussed and articulated by government - something that democratic governments are quite good at doing. Only their achievement would be subject to the market, which economic theory and all the evidence suggest is the most efficient way of allocating society's scarce resources. No doubt the Social Policy Bond idea could do with some discussion and refinement. But the real question is: what is the alternative? To continue as we are doing, where the gap between vested interests and ordinary people grows ever wider, risks, in my view, social collapse.

For more about Social Policy Bonds see the Social Policy Bonds homepage.

Harlem trendsetters

Years ago John Fund asked:

“If you had a financial windfall and wanted to help the poor, would you even think about giving time or a check to the government?” Source

A story from the current Economist reinforces the sentiment behind that question: 

Harlem is a neighbourhood in upper Manhattan that was once a byword for poverty, crime and urban failure. It was a place where, as recently as 1980, black men had a lower life expectancy than in Bangladesh. Large parts of it look different today. Life expectancy has soared, and the neighbourhood has improved dramatically. Although a considerable share of children there—35%—remain poor, their life chances still look much better than a generation earlier.

That is in no small part because of the efforts of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a non-profit group which has “adopted 100 blocks” and set itself the goal of breaking the intergenerational chain of poverty by providing good parenting advice, healthy food and education. New parents who attend the zone’s Baby College learn about proper nutrition and reading habits for their infants. Older children can attend free, full-day pre-kindergarten and some go on to attend the HCZ network of charter schools. Their impressive initial results are seen as a national model. The zone serves 14,000 children and 14,000 adults at a cost of just $4,600 per person per year (raised from a mix of public and private sources). That is not a large sum of money, points out Anne Williams-Isom, the zone’s boss. “We spend $167,000 on an inmate in Rikers [jail]. How much can enterprise and philanthropy help alleviate American poverty?, 'Economist', 26 September

When I first came up with Social Policy Bonds I thought that government bodies, at any level, would be the issuers. They have far more resources than private charities, non-governmental organisations and philanthropists.

It's true that they, along with other donors, back most of the Social Impact Bonds currently being issued in about 25 countries. But they have shied away from issuing SIBs that target long-term, large-scale goals like raising life expectancy or universal literacy. Imagine the possibilities if government funded such bodies as the Harlem Children's Zone, with their ambitious goals that can be reached only after many years.

I think the main reason Social Policy Bonds haven't been issued is that, unlike SIBs, they are tradeable. This means that the bodies that would receive funding for their projects need not be the same throughout the lifetime of the bond, which could be decades for remote goals such as the elimination of poverty or the achievement of universal literacy. A government that issued Social Policy Bonds would therefore be relinquishing its power to choose the recipients of funds. Under a bond regime the allocation of funds would be up to the market, which would have incentives to choose only the most efficient operators and to terminate failed projects. Bodies currently favoured by government would, if they were inefficient and incapable of adapting, lose their funding under a Social Policy Bond regime. That is a contrast today's funding arrangements. In conventional policy, outstanding failure is rarely penalised (and often rewarded). Even under a SIB regime, inefficient operators, while they wouldn't maximise their returns, wouldn't see their existence be threatened.


Under both conventional policy and SIBs there is the possibility that even bodies as the HCZ well-meaning, hard-working and idealistic as they are at the beginning of their mission, become inefficient. The tendency is for any organisation, be it a trade union, religious body, university, public sector body or monopolistic private sector corporation, to become inefficient or corrupt; forgetting its ideals and devoting most of its energies to self-perpetuation. Examples abound: only today for instance, we read of the huge salaries being paid to top charity employees. Just one recent example:

Former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband is being paid almost $1 million a year to run a humanitarian charity that receives massive sums from British taxpayers. His astonishing pay package as chief executive of International Rescue Committee has soared to $911,796 (£741,883) ... according to the US-based organisation’s latest tax return. Million-dollar Miliband!, mailonline, 1 October

Social Policy Bonds would eliminate that risk. They would generate a new type of organisation - one whose survival would depend absolutely on its efficiency, and whose composition and structure would adapt to changing circumstances. This organisation would be a formal or informal coalition of bondholders, whose every activity would be devoted to achieving society's targeted goal with maximum efficiency. It's unlikely that governments will take the lead here; they are far more comfortable dealing with established players. What about philanthropists? I haven't made much headway there - they probably filter out messages from unconnected members of the public. However, I did publish this article in one of their journals last year. I'm not aware of any follow-up....

For more about Social Policy Bonds see my main page here. For why I am ambivalent about Social Impact Bonds see here and here.