Most policy issues are not about allocation of resources, but about rights and duties, what is allowed and forbidden, rewards and punishments.
Should we imprison murderers for 10 years or 15? Should the minimum wage be set at $10 or $15 per hour? Should same-sex marriage be legalized? Should churches be tax-exempt? Should the NSA be allowed to spy on citizens? Should the Iran nuclear deal be accepted? Should a profession or a market or a monopolist be regulated, and how? When and how should people be allowed to keep pets, build houses, design gardens, prepare food, take medications, copy books, have sex? What are people legally allowed to say and do and how should transgressors be punished? What is good art, and when is art illegal?
These are all random examples off the top of my head of issues referring to (recent) matters of political debate; they are probably not very representative. None of them seems to have a simple framing in terms of resource allocation.
Resource allocation is also debated, of course. But even then, some of the time, the different sides don’t have different viewpoints on correctly balancing resources, e.g. with one party wanting 40% to go to medicine and 60% to welfare, and another 50% to medicine and 50% to welfare. Instead, one party wants (ideally) 100% to go to medicine, another wants 100% to go to welfare, and the actual split is determined by the political balance between them and not by object-level quantitative considerations.
You usually need both. Experiments need a conceptual framework and besides in some cases (e.g. politics or macroeconomics) running experiments is pretty difficult.
What else would you debate if not distribution of limited resources? And there are better ways to gain wealth than politics.
Most policy issues are not about allocation of resources, but about rights and duties, what is allowed and forbidden, rewards and punishments.
Should we imprison murderers for 10 years or 15? Should the minimum wage be set at $10 or $15 per hour? Should same-sex marriage be legalized? Should churches be tax-exempt? Should the NSA be allowed to spy on citizens? Should the Iran nuclear deal be accepted? Should a profession or a market or a monopolist be regulated, and how? When and how should people be allowed to keep pets, build houses, design gardens, prepare food, take medications, copy books, have sex? What are people legally allowed to say and do and how should transgressors be punished? What is good art, and when is art illegal?
These are all random examples off the top of my head of issues referring to (recent) matters of political debate; they are probably not very representative. None of them seems to have a simple framing in terms of resource allocation.
Resource allocation is also debated, of course. But even then, some of the time, the different sides don’t have different viewpoints on correctly balancing resources, e.g. with one party wanting 40% to go to medicine and 60% to welfare, and another 50% to medicine and 50% to welfare. Instead, one party wants (ideally) 100% to go to medicine, another wants 100% to go to welfare, and the actual split is determined by the political balance between them and not by object-level quantitative considerations.
How the world works, for example.
That is something usually better settled by experimentation than by argument.
You usually need both. Experiments need a conceptual framework and besides in some cases (e.g. politics or macroeconomics) running experiments is pretty difficult.