Making History

This Thursday's Times Circuits section has an article on educational software called "Making History." It lets students play roles of historical figures to see if their choices would alter history -- for instance Chamberlain in Munich in 1938. (And of course the section has its usual uncritical reviews of blood-and-gore militarist games.)

The article (and the software's website) doesn't say what decision-making tools are embedded in the software. Obviously the computational difficulties of predicting the interplay of diverse factors in the kinds of choices portrayed are far more complex than those required in making decisions in the economic sphere alone (not that any decision is ever "just" economic). And in the absence of other evidence I'd assume the algorithms behind the choices are based on very limited data (and of course biased by the politics of its creators).

But ...

Elsewhere in this blog and its links I talk about using computers to plan a socialist economy. Implicit in managing such an economy is the need to calculate explicitly the social impact of economic decisions -- calculations which are relegated to "externalities" by mainstream economists. By the time we get to an economy run by networked workers' councils, we'll find that their programs 1) work up from the "strictly" economic data gathered at work and in the community to include more and more social data, and 2) that they work down from the supermacro level portrayed in games such as "Making History."