Outcome-Based Public Spending
Judging expenditure by measured wellbeing change, exposing trade-offs rather than pre-deciding them.
Outcome-based public spending
Public expenditure programmes can be evaluated by the measurable change they produce in the wellbeing dimensions they were intended to move, not only by whether their allocated budget was spent. For a domain like health, that might mean tracking healthy life expectancy, waiting times, preventable mortality and access; for education, literacy, numeracy, skills and social mobility; for housing, affordability, quality, security and energy cost — the specific metrics are a political and scientific question this specification does not attempt to settle.
Conceptually, for programme j receiving G_j:
read not as a single scalar efficiency ratio but as "what measurable
movement in desired outcomes did this expenditure produce". This
deliberately does not collapse health, education, housing, environmental
and freedom outcomes into one weighted number — see Objectives and
Constraints — it aims instead to expose trade-offs (Programme A costs £1bn and produces a small health gain; Programme B costs £200m and produces a larger one) for democratic decision-making to weigh, rather
than pre-deciding them inside a formula.
The operating loop is:
When an intervention's actual effect falls well short of its expected effect, the response this architecture calls for is not simply "spend more" — it is to treat that gap as information: implementation may have failed, another constraint may have become binding, behaviour may have changed, or the causal model may have been wrong. Each of those implies a different next step.