> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.

This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.

That's fine if they're benefiting from the status quo, that decision making should be left to those in-context.

The political experiments should be chosen and driven by small units in order to be safely contained.

Planning shouldn't be a top-down activity, strategy should be. Meaning , the bounds for decisions and the rules of play must be centrally determined, but not the experiments themselves.

I don't completely follow the last bit of your comment. It sounds like you agree that a centralized planner doesn't have enough context to make system wide decisions. Am I right?