I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that point B works in any practical way.
Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum) where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think.
What do other HNers think about this?