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Comment by lighthawk | Hacker News Reader

> You don't have to be a tea-partying libertarian to see that such an idea is shockingly naive.

But, it is a viewpoint deeply held. I've spoken with people over 30 and even over 50 years old that still bought into the idea that government is the solution to all problems.

On the other hand, the view that capitalism and privatization fixes all problems is just as flawed.

There is no one-system-fits-all and it can't even be said that one system is necessarily a better choice in any given situation. Status-quo is usually a good choice though, if it is working.

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> There is no one-system-fits-all and it can't even be said that one system is necessarily a better choice in any given situation. Status-quo is usually a good choice though, if it is working

I mostly agree with this except currently the Status-qou isn't working for most people and the environment. The pendulum swung too far towards the "government bad, markets good" end of the spectrum. To tackle the big problems of the day (Climate change, income inequality, chronic unemployment/underemployment due to technology changes and automation, etc) we will need much more government regulation. That includes local and national regulation with unprecedented global cooperation. The free market on its own has proven itself incapable of solving the problems society faces and in fact is causing some of the above problems.

For a thousand generations we did without both (govt and capitalism). SO a lot of systems are possible. Problem is, we need a system that scales, and village life doesn't scale. SnowCrash had a solution, sort of - walled communities with little interaction (except for the Pizza Guy).

Pizzanomics

There is no effective model for society. We cannot describe it in terms that allow us to predict it's behaviour. We are therefore doomed to a stumbling random walk through a phase space littered with nightmare scenarios. We need a tool to slay this beast, to show us how to make a society that can hold itself together.

That's pretty negative. Some parts of society are constrained by physics e.g. energy, food, transportation.

Engineering has a thing called 'control volumes', where you draw circles (volumes actually) around a system, and measure inputs and outputs. They must balance for a steady state to be achieved. Maybe by measuring things that actually matter (instead of for instance completely imaginary point systems like money or votes) we could constrain society to at least be stable.

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