[oezi]

I get the bearish case but it is easy to forget how much difference good vs bad politics can have and that politics isn't primarily a game of facts. It is an optimization problem under many unknowns and its history is littered with academic theories debunked and hard won compromises.

[mckelveyf]

I mean it's debatable that it's an optimization problem but it's been tried. One thread in the book is the reaction the Limits of Growth. That model extrapolated trends, very abstractly, to predict the future. A successor, the Latin American World Model or the Bariloche Model, tried to imagine an ideal world and optimize for it. Very different approaches and a good question to ask when you hear someone talking about computer simulations.