I believe a data-driven approach has worked here specifically because it's a very very small country with a very homogeneous culture. If we multiply the population by 1000, and if we introduce minorities and other agents that increase the heterogeneity of the population, the data-driven approach would stop working because there simply are too many things to take care of. It's like trying to win a war: as the amount of concurrent battles approaches infinity, so does the complexity of the war, and therefore the chances of winning sharply decrease.

The solution, as you just said, is to govern ourselves in a smaller scale. Apply data-driven solutions (like this one from Iceland) to smaller communities, one by one. Also, make sure those who apply these solutions are knowledgeable about how those smaller communities work.

You make it sound as if everyone in Iceland is literally the same person, and Mexican/African-American/Asian/White teens are irrevocably disjoint creatures from different planets or something.

There is a popular smart phone application in Iceland that people use to find out if the person they are nominally attracted to is a cousin or similar close family relation.

I wonder if the parent would take that as a challenge to create a startup around creating such an app for the US, since, well, apparently there is no compelling reason absent a pile of data to not think what works in one country won't work in another country .... That's not meant to be aggressive but I think it is a clear indictment of the reasoning used by many others rejecting what I think is a very obvious position.

All well-behaved squares fit right into the same square hole.

The not-so-well-behaved usually aren't square, and usually don't fit in anywhere.

I don't care if you downvote me.

The guidelines ask us not to go on about downvotes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html