In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something – so why aren’t we doing that with social policy?
And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do – if there’s enough of it – is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It’s there, somewhere.
Awareness of our problems thus does not necessarily mean that they get solved. I t may just mean that we are able to perfectly anticipate where we will fall.