The problem with solving problems

Anyone who has watched an Adam Curtis documentary — those who haven’t, fill your boots, they’re great — will be familiar with the idea that the Western world has moved from theocracy to ideocracy to bureaucracy over the last century.

Into the religious vacuum created by Darwin and Nietzsche came the disastrous utopian ideologies of the left and right, which failed pretty catastrophically (Fascism in 1945 and Communism by 1990) leaving only management of the polity as a meaningful model of governance model, and this is more or less how government has worked since the 1970s, aided immeasurably by the emergence of technology as a neutral, sterile means tool of organisation.

Economies that embraced this technologisation — specifically the US, Japan, East Asia and Western Europe — generally did a lot better than those that stuck with utopian models of centralised control, to the point where by 1990 political scientist Francis Fukuyama was confident to declare the end of history itself:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

History, it turned out, had other ideas.

Data science led naturally to systems thinking