Comment by mckelveyf

I mean it's debatable that it's an optimization problem but it's been tried. One thread in the book is the reaction the Limits of Growth. That model extrapolated trends, very abstractly, to predict the future. A successor, the Latin American World Model or the Bariloche Model, tried to imagine an ideal world and optimize for it. Very different approaches and a good question to ask when you hear someone talking about computer simulations.