I never understood why so-called policy makers want everything dumbed down into a single metric that then says how well a policy measure performs. Such as GDP, or tons of CO2(eq) emissions etc…
Because with just a single metric as a target, what politicians do is not systems engineering but policy-making “work” in a feedback loop “until it is enough”. There’s no overall vision, direction, no integration of partial systems etc… The Energiewende (energy system transition) in Germany is a good example for the half-measures and internal contradictions that this leads to.
Politics has to be systems engineering, and if it does not work because too many people are involved and they demand compromises, then the unit of politics has to be broken down into smaller units until it works. No need for indicators then, because the system is designed right from the beginning to not have any negative impact on the environment etc…
Indicators are only needed when dealing with half-measures and compromises. The proper way in engineering is to include a safety margin – means, human civilization must be designed as a net benefit for nature to compensate for the accidents when it won’t be. (For life-critical applications the safety margin is usually 500% – for example, a lifting cable of a crane will have a breaking strength of five times the maximum allowed load on the crane. Dealing with the environment would qualify as a “life-critical application” – on the very long term only of course – but humans do not have any safety margin here …)
In practice, “politics as engineering” could look like my proposed autarky system for cities. In which the cities would be sovereign.
Side node: at second reading it becomes clear that you don’t believe in the indicator paradigm anymore. At first reading though, my initial understanding was that you don’t believe anymore “that ethnography-at-scale via SSNA could integrate […] the indicator paradigm”. I guess the wording could be disambiguated a bit 