In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment.
Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.
This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.'
Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
Hypothetically, A firm like Tesla or SpaceX maybe be so successful in engineer feedback because they are high demand places to work and they have not exhausted the pool of individuals who can provide great work. However as the company needs to scale, or as the company becomes less glamourous you have people who either (1) just aren't as capable or (2) don't care to expend any creativity on solving the needs of the company (either because there's no reward or they are interested in other areas).
Furthermore, a company that is not centrally planned will most likely move slower than a centrally planned one. Just like how China is able to forcibly take your land to build railways; an action like that in a free society has many gatekeepers that would slow down such a process. Any public company, that is measured on a quartely basis would find themselves grappling with showing change to wall street.
For R&D departments and startups, plan economies can still work because the complexity is still small enough that humans can comprehend it.
It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work.
It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?