With your framing above, it was "everyone should be a homeowner" and "everyone should be educated"... well we did that. Reality conformed. Just at tremendous cost and risk.

The issues are of course way more complex than "# of ppl who own a home" and "# of ppl with a degree"

So the question, then, is how do we use instruments of governance to move complex systems in the direction we think we want.

This is complicated by, among other things: 1.) the fact that politicians are really just optimizing for "signaling" that they are fixing things rather than tangible results. 2.) long time horizons on these issues clashing with shorter time-horizons of political attention spans and our capacity to even reason about long-term things. etc...