We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

Domestic and supranational regulatory capture leads to two things: on the one hand, to an inequality spiral where the rich get richer because they can influence rulemaking and rule application in their favor; on the other hand, it also leads to instability. This is so because the relatively few organizations capable of influencing supranational rulemaking through the lobbying of major governments have diverse interests. This will, in some cases, lead to compromises. But it will also lead to spheres of influence.

There is at the global level a very small number of actors who can meaningfully weigh in on global institutional design, who are able - through powerful governments and most effectively through the government of the United States - to exert substantial influence on international negotiations, which are routinely conducted behind closed doors.

Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.

It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward.

In the United States there are only two exceptions: banks have to report deposits they suspect to be related to either terrorism or drug trafficking. But if your funds derive from trafficking women and children for sexual exploitation, for example, or from illegal arms trafficking or any other illegal activity, then banks in the US are legally free to accept your money and are not required to report your deposit to the authorities.

What we should do is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment - emissions averted or something of this sort.