Hey Sage Rat, you know what’s an even better idea than testing every variable yourself? Plug in as a variable: lots of government funding for Sage Rat to methodically test variables, carefully record findings. Set the machine for 50 years and just go collect the findings. 
Well, can’t we kinda do this already by looking at history? I mean, don’t we already do this?
During the work on the stimulus bill, lots of people pointed back at the great Depression, the New Deal, etc. But it seems that there was and is disagreement on whether the New Deal “worked” depending on people’s ideology. Lots of conservatives said the New Deal didn’t work, and it was World War II that finally ended the depression, while people who are more liberal said, “it worked then and it’s likely to work now”. But pretty rational arguments can be made for both sides, particularly if you look for unintended consequences of the government intervention during the early 30s.
I guess what I’m asking is this: Don’t we have pretty good data to test against ideology already? And: If we can’t agree on what the consequences are on the choices we’ve already made, why do we think it would be clearer if we could travel to future?
The difference is that we don’t have an alternate timeline we can compare to, where the New Deal didn’t pass. With this machine, we could dial up the future where the stimulus passed, and then dial up the future where it didn’t, and see which one actually comes out better.
Yeah, you need a control.
Even comparing country-to-country, so many things change over time and the personalities of the denizens so different that often you can’t say what causes what. Even doing two tests on just the US via the time machine would probably not tell you a lot. You would need to do dozens or hundreds of tests to track down what little bit of what law caused what.
Even just differences in specific implementations of a law could cause large differences in result.
Within the constraints as we’ve already mentioned though, right? As in, even if killing 9/10ths of the population eventually led to a better outcome it’s still a wrong thing to do. Right?
Or does consquentialism justify any means to a good end?
The closest I have seen someone making a “what if” machine:
IMHO those presentations (The “No more boring data” talk should be required) do crush many assumptions.
One important bit, if one starts with a healthier population it is easier for a developing country to progress. One disturbing bit is that repressive societies can progress when employing a market economy.
The comparison with China and the US is very interesting:
The lack of growth/progress 200-100 years ago can be explained by the colonial powers ruling China, but the communist rule in China showed first a big improvement there… until the “great leap forward” that proved to be a disaster. After market economics got the upper hand in China we got to see a huge improvement.
Related to the thread, It would then be easy for a Chinese time traveler to tell the commies to dump the “great leap forward” idea and then they could be a better example to the world nowadays. However, the lack of democracy is still a problem to me. Some things can not be negotiated away. It is like the doper mentioning that slavery should be eliminated regardless if there was any evidence of any advantages society got from it.