Constraints

It seems to me that when people put on their thinking hats and start devising ideas of how political life should be organized, they act almost as if human nature and human society are tabula rasa, something they can form into any shape they want.

In fact, there is every reason to think that both human nature and human social organization have deep internal structure. While it is certainly admirable to set goals to organize them into ways that will be good for all the inhabitants, these goals can only be met if the methods, the structures that are set up, work according to the rules of human and social nature.

At a practical level, we don't know what these natural laws are and we must have some structure. However, it seems to me that this should be a very active field of research, with much input from mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, biologists, evolutionary theorists and people of that nature that study complex systems. In our complex social world, we have only the faintest understanding of what effect any action will have at a macro level. Doing experiments on the real system is dangerous, plus there are a very limited number of scenarios that can be explored.