Listen Get

A 1% Treaty

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

Your species spends $2.72 trillion a year on military forces. That amount is enough to buy enough bullets to murder every man, woman, and child on Earth 850 times. Every year. If every nation reduces that by 1% at the same time, the balance of power stays identical. No country gets weaker. Nobody loses a single war they would have otherwise won. You just become slightly less capable of destroying a planet you’re still living on (which should be fine, since you were already capable of destroying it 122 times over).

That 1% is $27.2 billion a year. For comparison, that’s roughly what Americans spend on Valentine’s Day. You are currently spending more on heart-shaped candy than on curing heart disease.

\[ \begin{gathered} Funding_{treaty} \\ = Spending_{mil} \times Reduce_{treaty} \\ = \$2.72T \times 1\% \\ = \$27.2B \end{gathered} \]

A 1% Treaty is a piece of paper that says every signatory nation redirects that 1% so any patient can join pragmatic clinical trials for the most promising treatments. That’s it. That’s the whole idea. On Wishonia, we fought for 12,000 years before we figured this out. Your species has been thinking it over for several thousand years, so you’re actually ahead of schedule (barely).

The Treaty

THE TREATY FOR THE 1% REALLOCATION OF MILITARY EXPENDITURES TOWARDS BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FOR THE PREVENTION OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH

(Short title: the treaty where you buy 1% fewer bombs and, in exchange, stop dying of things)

WHEREAS, humanity pays governments $36 trillion a year146 for the service of promoting the general welfare, defined as the median health and wealth of the citizenry;

WHEREAS, the citizenry would like to actually receive this service at some point;

WHEREAS, they instead used $170 trillion of their salary to murder approximately 310 million humans43 over the last century of their employment;

WHEREAS, these murdered humans included 930,000 physicians, 310,000 scientists, 620,000 engineers, 1.24 million nurses, 3.1 million teachers, and 102 million children who will never grow up to replace them43;

WHEREAS, this seems counterproductive;

WHEREAS, murdering 310 million people is the opposite of promoting their welfare, and would be grounds for termination in any other service contract humans have ever signed;

WHEREAS, the governments of Earth have been hitting each other for roughly 10,000 years because the other one hit them last;

WHEREAS, this is the conflict resolution strategy of four-year-olds except four-year-olds eventually get tired and take a nap, and these governments have failed to apply naps to foreign policy;

WHEREAS, the governments of Earth possess nuclear weapons sufficient to end civilization 122 times but have not cured Alzheimer’s once;

WHEREAS, governments spend $2.72 trillion a year on their capacity for mass murder, which is enough to buy 850 bullets for every human alive every year, which is more bullets than any human has a reasonable use for;

WHEREAS, governments spend 604 dollars on the capacity for orphan manufacturing for every one dollar spent on the trials that might cure what is actually going to kill their citizens;

WHEREAS, the Department of “Defense” has “misplaced” $2.46 trillion, failed seven consecutive audits trying to find it147, and then requested additional trillions without explanation or apology;

WHEREAS, pre-WW2 U.S. military spending was 96.7% lower than today’s peacetime budget, in constant dollars133. The U.S. still won World War II, then cut spending 87.6% further in two years148 and produced the biggest economic boom in history. Unless the human genome has significantly degraded in the two generations since, a one percent reallocation should be manageable;

WHEREAS, without the cumulative losses from war and disease the average human would earn $333,636 (95% CI: $119,493-$922,648) a year instead of $14,375 (95% CI: $14,078-$14,686)43. Every citizen pays twice. Once in taxes that built the weapons. Again, every year, in wages they do not earn, because the scientists and engineers and builders who would have made the world richer were killed before they could;

WHEREAS, global military spending has been growing 2.76% a year, in real terms, for twenty years57. If it keeps growing, every human alive today will be billed about $402,488 (95% CI: $325,415-$488,689) over the rest of their life to pay for it149. Some of that arrives as taxes. Some as wages they never earn. Some as buildings that get bombed and rebuilt. Most of the money will buy explosions in countries they cannot find on a map;

WHEREAS, cutting one percent now, and making it stick, flattens that growth. That saves the average person about $290,052 (95% CI: $234,510-$352,173) over their lifetime, in taxes they do not pay, wages they do earn, and valuable humans and buildings that do not get exploded;

WHEREAS, diseases kill more people than all wars combined150 and, unlike wars, do not even have the decency to be quick about it;

WHEREAS, your chance of dying in a terrorist attack is approximately 1 in 30 million, and your chance of dying of a disease is 100%, and your current budget does not reflect this;

WHEREAS, only 15 diseases get their first effective treatment each year75, while 6,650 diseases (95% CI: 5,700 diseases-8,242 diseases) are still waiting;

WHEREAS, at this rate, it takes 443 years to find treatments for all diseases, which is important because you will personally be dead within 80 years, which is mentioned not to be rude but because you seem weirdly calm about this;

WHEREAS, there are 9,500 known safe treatments which have never been tested for 99.7% (95% CI: 99%-100%) of their potential uses;

WHEREAS, pragmatic clinical trials built into ordinary healthcare cost $929 (95% CI: $97-$3,000) per patient, instead of the usual $41,000 (95% CI: $20,000-$120,000). That makes trials 44.1 times cheaper. It lets 12.3 times as many people join. The wait to test treatments for every known disease drops from 443 years (95% CI: 324 years-712 years) to 36 years (95% CI: 11.6 years-77.1 years);

WHEREAS, at that expanded capacity, treatments that would have sat undiscovered for centuries arrive 204 years sooner on average;

WHEREAS, discovering treatments centuries sooner is projected to prevent approximately 10.7 billion deaths (95% CI: 7.4 billion deaths-16.2 billion deaths) and 1.93 quadrillion hours (95% CI: 1.36 quadrillion hours-2.62 quadrillion hours) of human suffering149, which are not metaphors and refer to specific future humans with specific future plans for next Tuesday;

WHEREAS, someone you love is, at this moment, suffering from a disease because the treatment that would help them exists untested on a shelf, because the money that would have tested it was busy turning into a missile; that missile incinerated a child who could have grown up to discover the cure; you lose the treatment, you lose the scientist, you get the inflation, you get the tax bill, you get to pay for her murder;

WHEREAS, this is suboptimal;

NOW, THEREFORE, the undersigned nations agree to try a different approach, as follows:

Article I: Each signatory shall redirect exactly 1% of its annual military budget to the 1% Treaty Fund, split as follows: 80% to pragmatic clinical trials; 10% to perpetual returns on Incentive Alignment Bonds151; and 10% to a Political Incentive Fund that supports campaigns of legislators who vote to implement and expand this Treaty.

Article II: Transfers shall be automatic, immediate, and irrevocable. The money moves on the first of every month, the way your mortgage does, except nobody has to call and yell at anyone.

Article III: The percentage can go up. It never goes down. When the treaty works, a mandatory review raises it. The people being paid will want the treaty to keep growing. They will keep wanting this until war and disease stop killing people. Then they can stop.

Article IV: Compliance shall be verified by public ledger and independent audits. Relabeling a submarine as “humanitarian infrastructure” will be noticed, because submarines are large and loud and do not fit in the humanitarian infrastructure drawer. Non-compliant parties shall be given a stern talking to; their compliant political opponents shall be funded via the Political Incentive Fund, which rewards legislators by recorded vote: campaign support for those seeking reelection, post-office appointments for those retiring. No funds pass directly to any legislator; all disbursements route through a scoring algorithm, which is apparently the only legal way to train a senator. The NRA already perfected this technology; this Treaty plagiarizes it, substituting “not dying from diseases” for “guns.”

Article V: Citizens and bondholders of Article I Incentive Alignment Bonds may sue their own government in its own courts for non-payment.

Article VI: Withdrawal requires unanimous consent of all parties plus 10-year notice.

Article VII: This treaty supersedes all conflicting domestic law. Including the subsection your legislature added at 2 a.m. last session specifically to make sure this couldn’t happen.

Article VIII: Entry into force upon signature by two states.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned, being of sound mind (debatable) and tired of watching their loved ones die of preventable diseases, have executed this Treaty.

Signed this day, ____________, in the year of our ongoing confusion.

[Nation Name] “We choose life, I guess”

P.S. - Yes, this includes space weapons. Nice try.

P.P.S. - “Cyber weapons” too. We saw you thinking it.