A big problem with the current incarnation of democracy is that there is no accountability over time of the various goals that officials claim to pursue.
If someone running for office says that they will make sure the local firehouse gets an X% increase in budget and that unemployment in the district will go down by Y%, there should be an unambiguous way of tracking, over time, how they are doing on their promises.
This "goal verification" seems like an important first step if one wishes to introduce meaningful computational processes in Washington. Ideally, over time, we would have a system against which we can run such promises: "The ministry of health says increasing the budget of X will lead to outcome Y, and our model agrees with this decision with a confidence of 90%".
Eventually, this system might even build excellent models of what happens in various parts of society when various parameters are modified. It could predict where new schools need to be opened based on the natality data provided by hospitals and local employment rates, what the plausible long ranging effects of lowering or raising corporate tax by x% would be, whether the opening of a certain factory requires increasing the budget of the firehouse in the neighboring district because the district is now over a certain threshold for fire risks, and so on.
Any analysis of the promise "unemployment in the district will go down by Y%" will be worse than useless, because politicians have little control over the unemployment rate. You would be judging them based on a coin flip. You have to include the quality of the initial promises.
As for modeling the effect of policy on the real world, lots of people already try to do this, and their results do not agree. It's a very hard problem, perhaps impossible.
If someone running for office says that they will make sure the local firehouse gets an X% increase in budget and that unemployment in the district will go down by Y%, there should be an unambiguous way of tracking, over time, how they are doing on their promises.
This "goal verification" seems like an important first step if one wishes to introduce meaningful computational processes in Washington. Ideally, over time, we would have a system against which we can run such promises: "The ministry of health says increasing the budget of X will lead to outcome Y, and our model agrees with this decision with a confidence of 90%".
Eventually, this system might even build excellent models of what happens in various parts of society when various parameters are modified. It could predict where new schools need to be opened based on the natality data provided by hospitals and local employment rates, what the plausible long ranging effects of lowering or raising corporate tax by x% would be, whether the opening of a certain factory requires increasing the budget of the firehouse in the neighboring district because the district is now over a certain threshold for fire risks, and so on.