A Data Science based (Operating Systems) approach for Democracy

Look at a city from an aeroplane as you come in to land. Roads, buildings and industrial complexes: it looks remarkably like a CPU chip. So where is the instruction set? Where is the operating system? In my last article, I described language as the DNA of society— the communication link between people. Today, I want to look at the operating system.

César Hidalgo makes something close to this point in his fantastic book Why Information Grows, which I highly recommend as genuinely “eye-opening.” Hidalgo asks us to understand economies through information, computation and complexity: cities accumulate human know-how, then embody it in physical products. (Google Books). An algorithm in computer science has input-processing-output. A business is pretty much the same.

Think of a city as a computational unit:

Input: raw materials. Processing: human knowledge, labour, machinery and increasingly AI. Output: products, services, infrastructure and knowledge.

It resembles an algorithm, and the process scales: businesses aggregate into industries, and industries into an economy. Robert Solow’s growth framework formalised something related. Output depends on capital, labour and technological productivity—K, L and A. (Nobel Prize)

K is physical capital: machinery, factories and the means of production. L is labour—with a u, the correct English spelling. That’s right, American readers: I didn’t make a spelling mistake. A represents technology or ideas. AI makes A especially interesting because, theoretically, it should multiply our ability to generate, distribute and apply ideas.

So if we are prepared to model economic growth scientifically, why do we remain so imprecise about social policy?

Politics Has an Accountability Problem

For all the fantastic work supposedly undertaken by policymakers, “normal citizens” like me and you might reasonably conclude that they are coming up short. Over and over again. They are living in the “Stone Age” when it comes to technology. I don’t consider most “politicians” to have really any academic merit. Most of them won’t make the cut in any serious discipline – physics, mathematics, biology. Imagine a nuclear physicist from GE or an Aeronautics engineer from Rolls Royce becoming a Prime Minister. The field doesn’t attract the best talent. Homelessness, plastic pollution and crime remain major problems. People struggle to obtain food and medicine. Yet incredible resources go into war. Because theatrics > actual output.

Am I making this up? No. Consider cobalt mining in the Congo. In 2016, sales were estimated at $2.6 billion, yet a 2025 analysis reports that only around 3% returned to the country’s economy. Adult miners earned as little as $2.15 a day producing minerals for our electronics. (Think Global Health) Read the Congo mining analysis.

Contrast Afghanistan. Brown University estimates $2.313 trillion in US spending associated with the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone through 2022, excluding some future veterans’ care and interest. (Costs of War) The cost was also reported by the BBC and Brown University.

Whether intervention was justified at its beginning is a separate question. But after twenty years, trillions of dollars and the Taliban’s return to power, citizens are entitled to ask: what objective was being optimised, and where was the stop condition? The graveyard for the Soviet Union almost became the graveyard for the US. If history taught anything, you simply don’t mess with the Afghans. 

Give Leaders Invisible “Handcuffs”

It sounds harsh. Handcuffs? Why not “guidance”, a “framework”, “recommendations”. Because we tried, and it didn’t work.

So, I think democracy needs more handcuffs—not handcuffs that put politicians in jail cells, but constraints that make them work for the public rather than merely in the country’s name.

No other discipline allows so much leeway. If a business........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)