A central factor in free market economies is confidence. Consumers need to have confidence in the future of their careers and the market. Investors - this is huge - need to be able to expect predictable behavior both from central banks and from corporations. A pessimistic populace leads to pessimistic investment and pessimistic investment constrains economic development.
The Vasudans visualize history as a space occupied by the living and the dead, a symbol already written but not completely uncovered. Their economics are in no small part driven by a deep-set pragmatism: a people born in sorrow, die in sorrow. What came before drives what will be, and if that can be understood, that understanding will be accounted for in the future. Consider how this worldview might contribute to their resilience, their ability to swallow enormous blows and leverage them into growth.
Vasudan simulation and projection is driven by the desire to understand and catalogue history yet to come.
The Tevs are still the Lost Generation. They are haunted by past glory and past failure and now their leaders fence themselves in carefully planned, coldly calculated probability trees and gamed scenarios, hunting for ways to avoid catastrophe, willing to pay great prices to achieve success. They view economic and political and military strategy as a pathfinding exercise defined by accepting calculated risks and selecting good payoffs. Contrast with the deepset Vasudan pragmatism this machinery of selective injury, this embrace of extremes: if that is what it takes, then that is what we must do. It's pragmatism of a different order, not 'this is how the process will go' but 'this is where we can strike to make a difference'. It's a more volatile kind of foresight.
Tev simulation and projection is driven by the desire to avert catastrophe at any cost.
The Ubuntu simulation program is driven by a teological desire to garden and shape behavior. Where the Vasudans describe the shape of the historical equation and the Tevs work at a program of life support and damage control, the UEF government concerns itself with building feedback loops that drive humanity towards a destination. Understanding enables gentle intervention. Economic policy leverages incentives and behaviors, less top-down than the Tev calculus but without the Vasudan trust in the stalwart faith of the individual. The Vasudans trust themselves to be robust cogs in a byzantine machine; the Ubuntu program instead tries to rework the individual cog to improve the function of the whole, and back again in a cycle.
Ubuntu simulation and projection is driven by the careful control of a sandboxed system towards a definite end.
Luis Dias brings up the excellent question of how each approach handles escalating complexity and escalating uncertainty. The Vasudans believe that everything is certain in the end; they are comfortable with intricacy, in their language and conduct and politics, but they do not see intricacy or complexity as fearful. They lack the human heuristic of risk aversion.
The Tevs attempt to clamp variables aggressively to control complexity. They view a situation spiraling out of control as the worst possible outcome, because the consequences are so huge. They will pay extensive and dramatic prices for agency in a situation: burning nodes, employing military force, initiating massive projects to drive the economy.
Ubuntu attempts to compass escalating complexity by bootstrapping its own ability to simulate complexity. Risk aversion is tackled by embedding the individual investor or agent in a system which appears to comprehend and manage risk as a whole, even if the individual cannot grasp that whole.
