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Treaty Feasibility & Cost Analysis

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

“Getting 195 countries to agree costs billions and takes forever.”

No. Getting countries to implement things costs billions. Getting them to sign papers is surprisingly cheap. Your entire diplomatic system runs on the principle that writing your name on a document feels like accomplishing something (it doesn’t, but it’s affordable).

What Treaties Actually Cost

NGO campaign budgets are rarely disclosed publicly, but treaty campaigns run on pocket change compared to the thing they create.

The Ottawa Treaty79 banning landmines took 14 months. One staff member, Jody Williams, grew a coalition to over a thousand organizations across 60 countries. 122 states signed. She won the Nobel Peace Prize. One woman with a phone convinced 122 countries to stop burying explosives in the ground where children walk. Your species is capable of remarkable things when one person gets sufficiently annoyed.

The Cluster Munitions Convention136 took about two years. Seven governments and a coalition of NGOs got 94 states to sign. The Arms Trade Treaty137 took a decade but started with three supporting governments. The Control Arms coalition138 published 50+ reports until 130 countries signed. The Nuclear Ban Treaty139 also took a decade. ICAN ran the entire operation with five staff in a Geneva office. 122 states voted yes. Another Nobel Prize. Five people in a Geneva office won a Nobel Prize. You have more people in your accounting department.

Pattern: Total to get a treaty signed: $15-50M. Your species spends more than that on Super Bowl ads for beer (the thing that makes you temporarily stupider). You will pay more to sell stupidity beverages during one sporting event than it costs to get 122 countries to agree on anything.

Inflation-Adjusted to 2024 Dollars

Using BLS CPI data10:

Treaty (Year) Original Cost Estimate 2024 Dollars Inflation Multiplier
Ottawa (1997) $15-25M $30-50M ~2.0x
Cluster Munitions (2008) $15-25M $23-38M ~1.5x
Arms Trade Treaty (2013) $20-30M $27-41M ~1.35x
Nuclear Ban (2017) $10-20M $13-25M ~1.25x

In today’s money: Treaty campaigns cost roughly $25-50M (2024 USD). Banning landmines: ~$40M to get the signatures, $5B+ to actually dig them up79. The paperwork is always the cheap part. The expensive part is doing the thing you wrote on the paperwork (your species often skips this part).

Cost for a 1% Health Treaty

Historical treaty campaigns ran on pocket change. But this is not just a signature campaign. It is a referendum engine, lobbying operation, diplomatic push, and reserve fund aimed directly at military budgets, which means you are picking a fight with the most powerful industry your species has ever created. The relevant planning number is not what it costs to collect signatures. It is what it costs to win a fight with the people who build aircraft carriers.

Budget Frame What It Covers Cost
Historical treaty-signing benchmark NGO-led campaigns to get signatures on paper $25-50M (2024 USD)
Modeled 1% Treaty campaign Referendum, lobbying, diplomacy, legal work, reserve fund $1B
Modeled annual burn Average spend across the campaign window $250M/year

The Math

Modeled campaign cost: $1B. What the treaty unlocks: $27.2B/year. Forever.

Even before you count downstream health gains, this is a one-year redirection of government spending far larger than the campaign that triggered it. You are not buying signatures. You are buying leverage.

How to Make Governments Sign Things

Politicians move when they see voters demanding it and political cover to do it. Give them both.

First, prove public demand. Get 3.5% of the population55 (280 million people) to say “yes” with verified identity. The 3.5% finding55 is not a magic law of treaty ratification. It is a coordination heuristic: the point where a cause stops looking like a niche moral hobby and starts looking like a voting bloc large enough to create career risk. That’s not activism. That’s a mandate.

Second, prove it’s safe. Peer-reviewed modeling showing every nation gains more in health savings than it loses in military spending. Politicians need cover the way vampires need darkness. Give them the numbers and they’ll pretend it was their idea (the second most reliable pattern in your political history, after blaming the previous administration).

Get 3.5 percent of people to care, show politicians the math won’t break anything, and suddenly they have to listen. Democracy has an override button.

Get 3.5 percent of people to care, show politicians the math won’t break anything, and suddenly they have to listen. Democracy has an override button.

Timeline to “Governments Can’t Ignore This”

With the first phase of a $1B campaign, you can reach “Treaty-Ready” status in 2-3 years: a platform with 280 million verified supporters (the 3.5% threshold), country-by-country impact modeling, and a coalition of 120+ supportive NGOs and 5-10 champion governments.

Once these assets exist, formal negotiations become very hard to avoid. Not because politicians want them. Because ignoring 280 million people is the kind of career decision that leads to “spending more time with family.”

The slow part is not physical implementation. It is coalition activation. Once a political threshold is crossed, budget priorities can move much faster than peacetime common sense suggests. The United States cut military spending by 87.6% in the two years after World War II. The bottleneck is not whether states can reallocate fast. It is whether enough pressure, cover, and institutional machinery exist to make them do it.

Two to three years to build the website, run the numbers, and assemble the coalition before you can ask countries to sign. Diplomacy is slow.

Two to three years to build the website, run the numbers, and assemble the coalition before you can ask countries to sign. Diplomacy is slow.

You aren’t buying a treaty. You’re buying the machinery that makes the treaty very hard to refuse.

Political Success Probability: Economic Analysis

This section documents the rationale for the 1% central estimate (and a 25% optimistic scenario ceiling). The model assumes failure is the base case. It’s still a good bet. On Wishonia, we would not invest in something where failure is the base case. On Earth, this is called “venture capital” and your richest humans do it professionally.

Even at 1% probability of success, this intervention’s expected cost per DALY ($0.177) is still 503x more cost-effective than malaria bed nets ($89/DALY). Bed nets are the gold standard of global health interventions. This beats the gold standard while assuming it will almost certainly fail. The math doesn’t care about your pessimism.

Metric Point Estimate 95% CI
Political success probability

1%

 0.1%-10%
Expected cost per DALY

$0.177

 $0.029-$3.20
Cost-effectiveness vs bed nets

503x

 30x-3.0kx
Bed net cost per DALY

$89

 $78-$100

Historical Precedents (The Depressing Table)

Commitment Target Actually Did It? Duration Notes
0.7% ODA Target 0.7% of GNI to foreign aid ~20% of countries 50+ years Scandinavia and Germany. That’s basically it.
Kyoto Protocol Binding emissions targets ~55% initially, then collapse 1997-2012 US never ratified. Canada withdrew. Classic.
Paris Agreement Non-binding pledges ~15-25% on track 2015-present 195 countries signed. Maybe 40 meant it.
NATO 2% GDP Defense 2% of GDP on defense ~72% of members (2024) Since 2014 Was ~32% until an actual land war in Europe motivated compliance. Took tanks rolling across a border to get countries to spend more on killing. No equivalent motivator exists for spending on not-killing.
EU Stability Pact 3% deficit, 60% debt Routinely violated Since 1997 France and Germany broke their own rule

Pattern: International financial commitments achieve <25% meaningful compliance. Your species signs things and then doesn’t do them. It’s like a New Year’s resolution, but for geopolitics. The gym membership analogy is overused but accurate: purchased with enthusiasm in January, abandoned by February, cited in arguments about personal growth throughout March.

Why a 1% Treaty is Harder Than Most Precedents

Let’s be honest about the obstacles. This is not a chapter written by someone trying to sell you something. (It is. But at least it’s honest about the hard parts.)

It touches military budgets, and politicians would rather discuss their browser history than their defense budget. It requires ongoing annual allocation, not a one-time signature, which makes it a gym membership for peace (monthly, forever, no quitting). There’s no immediate security threat driving it; 150 thousand deaths/day apparently doesn’t qualify as a catastrophe because the deaths are distributed, quiet, and polite, and your species only responds to deaths that are concentrated, loud, and rude. The mechanism is novel, and humans are suspicious of things they haven’t tried before (odd, for a species that invented bungee jumping). And nobody wants to sign first. Everybody wants to sign second. This is a fine strategy for a conga line.

Why a 1% Treaty Might Beat the Odds

Five reasons countries might sign: saves money, voters want it, legal precedent exists, morally defensible, and everyone else is doing it.

Five reasons countries might sign: saves money, voters want it, legal precedent exists, morally defensible, and everyone else is doing it.

It’s self-funding: the health dividends exceed the “cost,” so you make money by doing the right thing, which is the only way your species does the right thing. “Should we cure more diseases?” polls well across every political spectrum, alongside “Is water wet?” and “Should we pay Congress less?” It has a referendum pathway that bypasses government resistance (politicians hate this, which is how you know it works). It has visible beneficiaries: 150 thousand deaths/day. And each signing country makes the next more likely, because peer pressure is humanity’s most reliable technology and the reason your teenagers wear the same shoes.

Probability Estimates

Economists would find the following defensible (and economists find very little defensible, which is their brand):

Scenario Probability Translation
Pessimistic floor 0.1% Everything goes wrong. Global crises. Political gridlock. Asteroid, possibly.
Conservative central

1%

 Failure remains the base case. Still 503x better than bed nets.
Optimistic ceiling 25% A major crisis opens a political window. Or humans just… decide to be smart for once.

The model uses: Central estimate 1%

Expected Value (Even When You Assume Failure)

Worst case: you wasted less money than bed nets cost. Best case: you ended most diseases. Risk-reward has never been clearer.

Worst case: you wasted less money than bed nets cost. Best case: you ended most diseases. Risk-reward has never been clearer.

At 1% probability of success, expected ROI is 848k:1 (still positive, even assuming near-certain failure) and expected cost per DALY is $0.177, which is 503x better than bed nets at $89/DALY.

Downside: capped at ~$1B. You lose the cost of a nice yacht. Upside: unbounded. You cure most diseases.

Even assuming failure is the base case, this beats the gold standard of global health interventions. The downside is a yacht. The upside is the end of most disease. Your species makes worse bets every day in Las Vegas, except there the upside is a slightly larger pile of papers. The yacht will be fine. It was going to depreciate anyway.

The Chain Reaction Model: Why This Idea Cannot Stay Contained

Your species has a cognitive immune system. When someone suggests redirecting 1% of murder money to medicine money, approximately 90% of humans will dismiss it without engaging. This is the institutionalization rate: the probability that a human’s brain classifies “stop funding murder” as crazier than “continue funding murder.”

On Earth, this is called “being realistic.”

The question is whether a 90% dismissal rate prevents the idea from reaching someone who can act on it. This section answers whether reaching such people is overwhelmingly likely. (The next section addresses what happens once they understand the incentive structure.)

Direct Encounters

On your planet, important humans find ideas through news, conferences, advisors whispering in their ears, or occasionally by accident while searching for something else (this is how most of your scientific breakthroughs happen, and also how you discovered penicillin). Each of 2.98 thousand potential implementers (2.78 thousand billionaires7 plus 195 heads of state) has an annual probability 0.5% of stumbling across this idea. That is a very small number per person. But there are a lot of persons.

The Mathematics

The probability that a given implementer encounters the idea within 10 years:

\[ P_{enc,10} = 1 - (1 - P_{enc})^{T} \]

The per-implementer probability of engaging (encountering AND not dismissing):

\[ P_{impl,engage} = P_{enc,10} \times P_{engage} \]

The expected number of implementers who engage:

\[ \begin{gathered} E[N_{engaged}] \\ = P_{enc,10} \times P_{engage} \times N_{impl} \end{gathered} \]

The probability that at least one engages: 100%.

That is not a typo. With 2.98 thousand potential implementers and a 4.89% per-implementer encounter probability over 10 years, the model expects approximately 14.5 implementers to engage with this idea. Not guaranteed in the mathematical sense. But in planning terms, this is the kind of number you treat as near-inevitable unless your diffusion assumptions are wrong. The dismissal rate stops mattering once enough shots are on goal.

This model answers only: “Is it overwhelmingly likely to reach someone who matters?” The answer is yes. The next section asks: “What happens once it does?”

This model is deliberately conservative in three ways:

  1. Base engagement rate: Uses the same engagement rate for personal recommendations as for passive exposure (personal recommendations convert at ~3x higher rates)
  2. Narrow implementer definition: Counts only billionaires and heads of state (excludes foundation heads, WHO officials, major fund managers, etc.)
  3. No compounding: Ignores the feedback loop where media coverage of early adoption increases subsequent encounter rates, and ignores network amplification (people sharing the idea with others)

The Decision-Theoretic Case: Why Rational Actors Eventually Move

The chain reaction model says approximately 14.5 implementers will probably engage with this idea. The next question is what they do once they understand it. On Wishonia, they would act immediately, because on Wishonia we are not insane. On Earth, you need to prove that acting is profitable, because your species will not save itself for free.

The Incentive Structure

Most “save the world” pitches are public-good pleas. Public goods have a free-rider problem: everyone wants the bridge, nobody wants to pay for the bridge, and so the bridge doesn’t get built and everyone drowns in the river while complimenting each other’s fiscal prudence. This design is different. It routes part of the upside back to whoever moves first.

Others also act No one else acts
You act Treaty passes, you capture 272% annual returns as an early backer, plus humanity gets healthier (side benefit). You still bought a cheap option on the largest health intervention in history. The yacht money was going to depreciate anyway.
You wait Someone else gets the returns, the credit, and the Wikipedia entry. You get to explain that you were “still doing due diligence.” Nothing changes. 150 thousand deaths/day continue. You remain rich, mortal, and forgettable.

This does not make action a mathematical certainty. It makes action the obviously attractive move for anyone who can read a spreadsheet and prefers not dying.

Why the EV Is Not Just Moral

“Good for humanity” has never been enough to make humans act. If it were, you would have cured malaria with the money you spend on novelty phone cases. The mechanism has to pay people, because your species requires payment for everything including not dying.

  • For funders: VICTORY bondholders are modeled at 272% annual returns if the treaty passes. That is the price of being early to the largest health intervention in history.
  • For politicians: $2.72B/year in campaign support for legislators who voted yes. Reelection fuel. The only substance politicians metabolize.
  • For governments: they trade a small fraction of murder budget for lower disease burden, visible domestic wins, and $27.2B/year in new health-research funding. This is the kind of deal where saying no requires active effort.

The claim is not “humanity benefits, therefore billionaires act.” Your species is not built that way, and pretending otherwise is how you got 50 years of unmet 0.7% ODA targets. The claim is: this architecture pays funders, politicians, and states enough that someone with resources has a reason to move first.

Why This Should Matter Even to a Self-Interested Billionaire

If you are extremely rich, the relevant question is not “Is this charitable?” Charity is what you do to feel better at galas. The relevant question is: “Does this improve the expected future for me, my family, and the pile of assets I’m sitting on like a dragon who read an economics textbook?”

  1. Your family is made of biology. Private jets, private islands, and private security do not protect your children from cancer, neurodegeneration, autoimmune disease, antibiotic resistance, or aging. Redirecting $27.2B/year into treatment discovery is not altruism in the abstract. It is a direct attack on the probability that everyone you love dies the normal human way.
  2. Your fortune sits on top of the productive economy. When the destructive/parasitic economy reaches equilibrium with the productive one, wealth preservation gets harder for everyone. The current destructive economy is already $13.2T/year, or 11.5% of GDP, and the model projects it reaching the failed-state danger zone in 8 years if the loop is not broken.
  3. The upside is macro-scale, not boutique-scale. The 20-year model projects the Treaty Path producing 16.5x the GDP of doing nothing. The fuller Wishonia path, where the political dysfunction tax46 is also removed, projects 56.7x. The broader system is currently bleeding $101T in opportunity cost, or 87.8% of global GDP. If you are rich because you own claims on future productive output, this matters to you personally.

In other words: this is not “give up 1% of military spending so strangers can feel better.” It is “buy a claim on the healthier, richer, less collapse-prone future in which your family survives longer and your assets sit on top of a civilization that still functions.”

Conditional Near-Inevitability Claim

On Wishonia, we would call this “stating the obvious.” On Earth, you need formal logic to accept that rich people who prefer not dying will eventually invest in not dying. Fine. Here is the formal logic.

Let X be the minimum number of rich, capable humans needed to finance a $1B campaign. In the current model, X = 4. The pool of plausibly aligned principals is 30. You need 4 out of 30. Your species has worse odds at every casino on the Las Vegas Strip and you still show up.

If:

  1. Rich humans prefer living. They recognize that redirecting $27.2B/year into treatment discovery improves the odds for everyone they love. (If this premise is wrong, your species has larger problems than this treaty.)
  2. The macro upside is directionally correct. Treaty Path: 16.5x the GDP of doing nothing after 20 years. Wishonia path: 56.7x.
  3. The collapse-risk model is directionally correct. The destructive/parasitic economy is already $13.2T/year (11.5% of GDP) and trends toward the failed-state danger zone within 8 years.
  4. Enough upside is privately capturable. Funders get financial returns, reputational credit, agenda-setting power, and the continued existence of the productive economy their fortunes sit on top of.
  5. At least X rational actors are persuaded. 4 billionaires or heads of state understand premises 1-4.
  6. Execution friction stays below surplus. Coordination costs and political friction don’t eat the entire upside. (They never have for any project with this ratio of cost to return.)

Then the campaign launches. Not because every billionaire acts. Because only 4 need to, the downside is capped at $1B (one yacht), and the upside is measured in survival.

If the number of persuaded actors materially exceeds 4, then failure requires a surprisingly specific story: simultaneous breakdown in persuasion, coordination, incentive capture, and execution across the entire aligned pool. On Wishonia, we have a word for betting on that kind of simultaneous failure. The word translates roughly to “stupid.”

Minimal Launch Probability Model

Forget the planet. Forget the average billionaire (he’s busy buying a sports team). Ask only: does a launch coalition form from the tiny slice of rich humans who already care about not dying?

In the current minimal model:

  • Plausible high-alignment principal pool: 30 people
  • Required lead principals: 4
  • Expected ready launch principals within 10 years: 5.85
  • Probability a launch coalition forms: 86.3%

In plain English: you need 4 people out of 30 who already agree with the premise. On current assumptions, that coalition forms with probability 86.3% within 10 years. This is like asking whether at least three people in a room of health-obsessed billionaires will invest in health. Your species asks harder questions at trivia night.

This is not treaty ratification probability. It is the probability that enough capable humans emerge to fund a serious campaign. If this number is high, the objection changes from “nobody will touch this” to “who moves first, and how long do they pretend to think about it?”

Why Delay Becomes Irrational

Once you believe a coalition is likely to form anyway, waiting stops looking prudent and starts looking like the time you didn’t buy Apple stock because you wanted to “see how it plays out.”

  • Move early: You define the structure, recruit the coalition, capture the largest returns, and get the Wikipedia entry that says “one of the people who ended most disease.” Your grandchildren reference it at dinner parties forever.
  • Wait: Someone else writes the terms, gets the credit, and locks in first-mover influence. You explain to your grandchildren that you were “monitoring the situation,” and they nod politely while looking at their phones.

The question is no longer “Will anyone fund this?” It is “Do I want to be one of the 4 who shaped the largest health intervention in history, or the person who arrived after the structure was set and asked if there were still tickets?”

What Would Have To Be Wrong

If no serious actor moves within 10 years, then at least one of the following is true:

  1. The expected-value math is wrong. The ROI, health gains, or funding leverage do not hold. Check the math in the appendix.
  2. The idea never reached enough decision-makers. The diffusion model failed in the real world.
  3. The private-incentive bridge is weaker than modeled. The surplus exists, but not enough of it is capturable by first movers.
  4. Hidden costs dominate the visible upside. Reputational risk, retaliation, legal friction, or coordination costs are larger than assumed.
  5. Enough elite actors prefer inertia to asymmetrical upside. Possible. But across a plausible aligned tail of 30 principals inside a broader universe of 2.98 thousand implementers over 10 years, it is not the first explanation a rational model should reach for.

Your task, if you want to reject this, is to pick one. Not to gesture vaguely at “complexity,” which is what humans say when they mean “I don’t want to think about it.” Pick the failure mode. Show your work. Your species demands this of schoolchildren. Surely you can manage it for a question about whether to cure diseases.

Why This Still Feels Inevitable

This is still a probabilistic story. But once diffusion and incentives are combined, it stops looking like a fragile moonshot and starts looking like a machine that is hard to keep dormant. The chain reaction model handles reach. The incentive design handles motion. The question stops being “can this happen?” and starts being “how long can everyone with money, ambition, and pattern recognition keep pretending this is not in front of them?”

Your species has a peculiar habit of treating path dependence as optional. It isn’t. Once a mechanism pays people to expand it, the default trajectory changes. This is how you built railroads, credit markets, social networks, and defense industries. A system that pays people to fund health instead of weapons is not a proof. It is something more dangerous: a machine with incentives pointing in the right direction.

Why The Treaty Won’t Stop at 1%

Most international commitments stagnate after signing. You saw the depressing table. 0.7% ODA targets unmet for 50+ years. Kyoto abandoned. Paris missed. Your track record with follow-through makes goldfish look disciplined. So why would a 1% health treaty be any different?

Because this time, people get paid.

The 80/10/10 funding structure allocates 10% of treaty funding ($2.72B/year at 1%) to Incentive Alignment Bonds140. These are securities that pay out when treaties expand, not just maintain. People get rich when more diseases get cured. It only took your species 400 years of financial instruments to produce one that doesn’t require someone to suffer (progress).

The Expansion Mechanism

Treaty Level Annual IAB Pool Political Pressure Historical Comparison
1% $2.72B/year Strong 10x largest NGO budgets
2% $5.44B/year Very strong Nation-state level
5% $13.6B/year Overwhelming Major industry lobby
10% $27.2B/year Probably irresistible No precedent

Why This Differs from Every Other Treaty

0.7% ODA failed because nobody made money when countries complied. The NGOs pushing for compliance run on guilt. Guilt has terrible fuel efficiency. Guilt gets you to the gym in January. Greed gets you there in July. Guilt volunteers at the soup kitchen once. Greed builds the soup kitchen and names it after itself. This treaty runs on greed.

Old way: charities beg governments. New way: investors get paid when governments cooperate. Greed works faster than guilt.

Old way: charities beg governments. New way: investors get paid when governments cooperate. Greed works faster than guilt.

The 1% health treaty creates its own expansion lobby. Bond holders profit when the treaty expands to 2%, then 5%, then 10%. These aren’t activists you can ignore at a dinner party. They’re investors with quarterly earnings calls about curing diseases. They have Bloomberg terminals. They have lobbyists. They have the same tools that weapons manufacturers currently use to expand military budgets, except pointed in the opposite direction.

The Ratchet Effect

Once 1% passes, $2.72B/year flows to IAB holders pushing for 2%. When 2% passes, $5.44B/year pushes for 5%. The engine runs on compound greed, which is like compound interest but for not dying.

The politicians feel it too. The treaty’s 10% political incentive allocation scales identically: at 1%, it’s $2.72B/year in campaign support for legislators who voted yes. At 5%, five times that. A politician who votes to expand the treaty is voting to expand their own reelection budget. You didn’t change what politicians are. You changed what they’re rewarded for.

Most treaties are gym memberships purchased in January and abandoned by February. This one has a constituency that grows with each success. On Wishonia, we find this arrangement embarrassing. On Earth, it’s the only arrangement that works.

Long-Term Feasibility

Path one: treaty fizzles. Path two: financial incentives make it grow to $2.7 trillion like compound interest for not dying.

Path one: treaty fizzles. Path two: financial incentives make it grow to $2.7 trillion like compound interest for not dying.

With IABs, the 10% allocation creates a perpetual political engine. A machine that runs on greed and outputs health. Embarrassing, but effective. The most effective things your species has ever built have all been embarrassing. The internet was built for sharing research papers and is used for arguing with strangers. Democracy was built for collective wisdom and is used for electing celebrities. This machine is built for curing disease and is powered by selfishness. The pattern holds.

Without IABs, this joins Kyoto in the Museum of Things Humanity Promised to Do and Then Didn’t. The museum is very large. It has a gift shop. The gift shop sells promises.