Experts are a nice resource to have, but they're not a cure-all. Not all of our legislature's representatives have systemically good incentives. Regardless of

Experts are a nice resource to have, but they're not a cure-all. Not all of our legislature's representatives have systemically good incentives. Regardless of their ability to understand complexity, complexity offers them the ability to obfuscate. Ignoring any bad faith or corruption, though, our legislatures are also a limited compute resource. If the complexity of modern society rises by orders of magnitude, the tools legislatures previously used to tackle complexity may not scale to the new challenges, or may simply be too slow to address the issues while they are relevant. One of my first areas of research was mapping legislature throughput to variations in rates of technological change. It appears most western governments addressed social issues arising out of the industrial revolution, for instance, exceptionally slowly. To summarize a few years of reading in the library stacks: the relationship between social complexity and quality of governance is not well understood.