[dragonwriter]

> But I'm talking about the decision-making process.

So am I. The decision making process that goes into "social/political" things is pretty much economic.

> We don't decide whether global warming needs to be addressed using a profit-maximization algorithm.

Social/political decision making is aggregating individual efforts to maximize the world's alignment with each individual's own preferences.

There's no difference between this and economic decision making.

> It's a moral question.

"Morality" is just one subset of personal preferences against which people act to optimize. The distinction between it and other subsets of preferences (like "aesthetics", etc.) is arbitrary.