Social Engineering

Last update: 03 Oct 1994 12:03
First version: Before 13 March 1995

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By which, following Popper, I mostly mean the piece-meal design of institutions, and methods for trying to cope with their side-effects.

See also:
• Democracy
• Institutions and Organizations
• Political Decision Making
• Regulation

Recommended:
• Kenneth Arrow, The Limits of Organization
• David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process
• R. A. Dahl and C. E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes
• Mark A. R. Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
• Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
• Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

Modesty forbids me to recommend:
• Henry Farrell and CRS, "AI as Social Technology", Knight First Amendment Institute Occasional Papers 26-5, 11 May 2026

To read:
• Lucy Bernholz, Creating Phlanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution
• Robert Boguslaw, The New Utopians: A Study of System Design and Social Change [1965]
• Tom Douglas, Change, Intervention and Consequence: An Exploration of the Process of Intended Change
• Robert E. Goodin (ed.), The Theory of Institutional Design
• Neil Komesar, Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics and Public Policy
• Jack H. Knott and Gary J. Miller, Reforming Bureaucracy: The Politics of Institutional Choice
• Rebecca Lemov, World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men [Review by Sarah Igo in American Scientist]