re: #184 Sherlock Hound

I can’t remember the SF novel I read: A cabal DID run the world using a kind of psychohistory.

They were incompetent.

Issac Asimov’s “Foundation,” “Foundation and Empire,” and “Second Foundation.”

The Foundation were the psychohistorians who predicted the fall of the sclerotic Galactic Empire by a series of events which could be predicted by the behaviour of masses of large numbers of people.

The psychohistorians themselves were also puppeteers who helped guide the course of events, until a single person came along that their mathematics could not predict and upset the whole balance.