[This proposal is intended for the special session on “Changing norms in the relationship between economics and politics”]

In the 40s and 50s of last century, the presence of new mathematical tools – first of all game theory – combined with the first steps of cybernetics and neural calculus, created a new wave of expectations towards the nascent computer science, with the social sciences were in the front row.

The precondition, however, was that of the availability both of computing power and of the tools to program it, with the possibility of applying statistics, and its evolution in the economic field – namely econometrics – to analyze large-scale socio-economic phenomena.

Computers made easy the solution of models with many equations and many variables, with the perspective of forecasting and planning, with simulation. The improvement of the techniques was extraordinary, but still insufficient for practical use. The main obstacle to the centralized planning activity in the communist countries was the lack of computing power over the years of the most important efforts for the effective use of planning in real life.

Making a jump to recent years, the new form that the social sciences and economics most recently draw from the computer science, in particular object-oriented techniques, is the construction of artificial worlds populated by agents, to explaine the emergence of macro effects through their behavior.

Finally, artificial intelligence algorithms and cognitive science are introducing a new revolution in perspective of policy making, also with of new perspectives in planning.