Engineers In Politics

It is in the nature of politics that there always has to be compromise. So I'm always rather surprised that more engineers and mathematicians are not involved - given how much of optimization is required. For instance, you are perpetually trying to maintain a very fine balance between taxation and providing public services and that requires considable opmization. Maybe there are loads of engineers working behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

The general drawback to having engineers as political optimizers, I suppose, is that they tend to be people who look at the problem completely dispassionately. This is fine if what you want is the best objective solution to the problem at hand, but that may not be what the voters want. When you consider voter demands - and you have to; that's kind of the point - you are bringing emotion into the problem, and engineers are not exactly experts at handling that. Perhaps engineers do get hired, but only after they get an MBA or something to get people skills and learn how to be pricks. It would be interesting to see how many politicians/beaureaucrats have backgrounds in engineering or mathematics or some other technical science.