Clinical medicine is a better analogy than technical rollouts. But you're right, modern development economics argues that social fixes (policies) should be empi

Clinical medicine is a better analogy than technical rollouts. But you're right, modern development economics argues that social fixes (policies) should be empirically driven using evidence-based randomized control trials. Esther Duflo has pushing this approach at the MIT Poverty Action Lab. The main insight is to reject grand generalizations and broad theorizing. Sitting in an armchair pondering how to "fix capitalism" is unlikely to lead to useful lines of thought. Society is too complex a system, cause & effect relationships can be highly localized and context-dependent; formulaic thinking just leads one down ideological rabbit holes.