Incentive Alignment Bonds: Making Public Goods Financially and Politically Profitable

Website: https://manual.warondisease.org/knowledge/appendix/incentive-alignment-bonds-paper.html

Abstract: Government spending correlates with lobbying intensity, not marginal societal value. Programs with benefit-cost ratios exceeding 100:1 (vaccines, e-governance) receive single-digit billions while programs with negative net returns (military beyond deterrence, fossil fuel subsidies) receive hundreds of billions. This paper introduces Incentive Alignment Bonds (IABs), financial instruments that realign politician incentives with net societal value optimization. IABs create a capital pool funded by treaty inflows (80% to pragmatic clinical trials, 10% to investor returns, 10% to political incentives) that rewards politicians (via campaign support and post-office career opportunities) for funding high-NSV programs over low-NSV alternatives. The mechanism requires no legislative change: existing PAC infrastructure, impact bonds, and prediction markets can deploy it today. Analysis of a proposed 1% Treaty redirecting \$27.2 billion/year from military spending to medical research shows a conditional 272% annual return for bondholders while the treaty remains in force. The 90:1 capital asymmetry (\$454 trillion in household wealth vs. \$5 trillion for concentrated interests) means diffuse beneficiaries can outspend incumbent lobbies once coordination problems are solved. IABs solve that coordination problem by turning political change into an investable asset class. A dominant assurance contract mechanism solves the bootstrap coordination problem: investor participation is the strictly dominant strategy regardless of beliefs about other investors' behavior, closing the end-to-end incentive chain from citizen coordination through treaty passage. At system scale, the Optimal Governance Trajectory reaches 56.7x (95% CI: 19.3x-304x) the Earth baseline after 20 years, raises average income to \$1.16 million (95% CI: \$395,118-\$6.22 million) versus \$20,483 on the status-quo path, reaches \$10.7 quadrillion (95% CI: \$3.64 quadrillion-\$57.2 quadrillion) in total output, and recovers roughly \$101 trillion (95% CI: \$83.3 trillion-\$191 trillion)/year in suppressed value ([The Political Dysfunction Tax](https://political-dysfunction-tax.warondisease.org)).

Summary: Government spending is optimized for lobbying intensity, not net societal value. Programs with 100:1 benefit-cost ratios get billions while programs with negative returns get hundreds of billions. Incentive Alignment Bonds flip this by creating a capital pool that rewards politicians (via campaign support and post-office opportunities) for funding high-NSV programs over low-NSV alternatives. The result: public good becomes private profit for both investors and elected officials.