III. The Grammar Already Exists

The most common reaction to Axiocracy is that it sounds utopian. Credit everyone by the value they created, against goals agreed in advance? Nobody does that.

In fact, quite a lot of people do. They just don’t call it anything, and they have never been put side by side. When you do, a shared grammar appears, one that has been reinvented independently in health care, in foreign aid, in public finance, in social investment, in firms and in government:

Agree the outcome. Publish the price. Verify independently. Pay for value delivered.

Let me walk up the scale.

The commons

Start with the oldest. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing that communities can govern shared resources (irrigation systems, fisheries, forests, pastures) for centuries without either a state or a market. Her design principles for durable commons have since been tested against dozens of cases. One of the best supported says that the benefits people draw from the commons are proportional to what they contribute, in labour, material or money. Another says that those affected by the rules help make and change them.

Put those two together and you have the axiocratic core, running in villages that have never heard of either Ostrom or Axiocracy. Contribution and benefit are linked, and the link is set by the contributors.

Health care

In 2010 Michael Porter argued in the New England Journal of Medicine that the overarching goal of health care should be value, defined as the health outcomes achieved per dollar spent. Not the number of procedures. Not the number of beds. Outcomes, measured over the full cycle of care for a medical condition. He noted that of 78 standard quality measures then in use in the US, all but five measured process, and none measured true outcomes.

Value-based health care has since become a global movement. It is imperfect and contested, but it has changed the question hospitals ask about themselves. That shift, from what did we do? to what did it achieve?, is the axiocratic shift.

Aid between nations

The Center for Global Development proposed Cash on Delivery Aid: a contract in which a donor pays a fixed amount for each unit of confirmed progress toward an agreed goal. The donor does not dictate how. Progress is verified by a third party, and the contract, the progress and the payments are all public. In one worked example, a donor pays $20 for every child completing primary school up to the baseline, and $200 for every child above it, rewarding only the increment. The vaccine alliance GAVI had already done something similar, paying $20 per additional child immunised.

Agree the what, not the how. Pay for the increment. Verify independently. Publish everything.

A nation’s clinics

Rwanda became one of the pioneers of performance-based financing, scaling it nationally in the late 2000s. Clinics were paid for results (quantity and quality of care) rather than inputs. Inside the clinics, the money had to be divided among the staff. In one scheme, facilities distributed payments “among personnel according to previously agreed criteria that captured the relative contributions of staff.”

That is Axiocracy, in a health centre in East Africa, a decade and a half before this essay.

Impact bonds let investors pre-finance a social programme, and outcome funders repay them only if agreed outcomes are independently verified. Outcome funds publish rate cards, public price lists for units of social value, and let providers compete to deliver them.

The best-documented case is the Educate Girls bond in Rajasthan, 2015 to 2018. Payments were weighted 20% on enrolment and 80% on learning. In year one the programme hit only 23% of its learning target. By year three, with the freedom to change course that outcome contracts allowed, it reached 160% of its three-year learning target, verified by an independent evaluator.

A firm of 60,000 people

Haier, the Chinese appliance maker, reorganised itself into thousands of autonomous micro-enterprises under a model called rendanheyi, “the integration of people and goals.” Each unit’s performance is measured against a combination of financial targets and user value added, and its members’ pay is tied to that performance. Even internal functions such as legal sell their services to other units for a fee. Every contribution has a price.

A sovereign cabinet

The most striking precedent sits at the very top of a state. Since 2012, a large part of Singapore’s ministerial pay has been a National Bonus tied to four indicators agreed in advance and weighted equally: real median income growth, real income growth of the lowest 20%, unemployment, and real GDP growth. The rulers’ bonus depends on the income of the bottom fifth. The Prime Minister receives no individual performance bonus at all, “as there is no one to assess his individual performance.”

Whatever one thinks of Singapore’s politics, this is a working answer to a question most democracies never ask: what would it mean to pay those who govern by the value they create for the governed?

Governments keeping value books

Underneath all of this sits the ordinary machinery of public appraisal. The UK Treasury’s Green Book requires specific objectives to be set before a project is appraised, and provides tables for putting a value on things once thought unpriceable. New Zealand’s 2019 Wellbeing Budget required bids to be justified against agreed dimensions of wellbeing, not just fiscal cost. The OECD tracks well-being on a dashboard of eleven dimensions rather than a single number.

Governments already run large machines that value outcomes against objectives set in advance. They use them to choose projects. Axiocracy proposes using the same logic to credit contributions.

And the honest caveat

The grammar exists. So does the counter-evidence, and it should be read with equal care.

The World Bank’s review of performance-based financing, covering nearly forty countries over fifteen years, found that health facilities improved, but that the performance-pay link itself was probably not the driving force. Giving facilities autonomy and flexible money did most of the work. Worse, rewarding measured dimensions of care led to the neglect of unmeasured ones. Verification could consume up to a third of administrative costs. The evidence base for impact bonds remains thin. Haier’s model depended on labour laws that would not survive in Europe. And Singapore’s meritocracy has become self-reproducing, with more than a billion dollars a year spent on private tuition.

These are not reasons to abandon the grammar. They are its specification. Reward every valued dimension or none. Verify cheaply, with algorithms and risk-based sampling. Pair credit with genuine autonomy. Protect labour rights by design. Weight shared goals toward the median and the bottom.

The precedents prove the grammar can be spoken. The failures teach it how to speak well. Axiocracy’s contribution is to say, clearly and in one place, that this is a single principle, and that it can be generalised.