Comment by asdff
4 years ago
The problem is that lawmakers are rarely statisticians and are sometimes even the people not trusting the models because they don't understand them. Someone needs to write up a bayesian form of government and then take over a country.
Or they are incentivized to not trust the models...
This is why command economies like China work today, when they did not in the past. With massive amounts of data and advances in theory, a centrally planned economy (and government) can be dramatically more efficient than a democracy.
The problem with command economies is that the incentives are broken, not that just that central planning is hard. The established elite uses political power to keep their position.
The USSR kept it running for half a century. Give them a while.
I think that's true for every system of both economics and governance. Capitalism, or at least the early (Adam Smith era) form of it, is merely an easy-to-implement approximation of alignment, where the incentives usually go in the right direction, but even that has to have significant pressure from beyond its natural feedback mechanism to get us things like 8-hour days, weekends, and health-and-safety laws that says it is not OK to employ small children to jump in and out of bone-crushingly heavy industrial machinery while it is in operation in order to clear blockages.
I want to be in charge of the priors.