I did think up some ideas one evening long ago and wrote down a rough note, but I don't think it would have much use for serious predictions (except as a fun toy to play around with to generate ideas)

A mostly un-edited, totally unpolished, and probably erroneous - don't judge too hard :) - version here:

- All goals are to some extent intermediate - a means to achieving a further goal - directed but not acyclic

- Some goals are largely measured by how useful they are achieving others, exemplified by stocks and tokens

- Node values are the measurement of the goal (in what?) and the edge values are the percentage split (like a Sankey diagram) but inclusive of factors less than 0 or greater than 1 (i.e any value) to be added to the value in the node, like y = y + (xf)

- (The x-f relationship could also be exponential - (xf^n) is a better equation)

- Maybe, by measuring the values of x and y empirically over time, we can try to calculate f. f has units to balance out the units of x and y, so no problem with incompatible units

- What are the nodes? Every damn thing that can be measured - prices of everything sold on the market, population statistics like literacy rates, time spent on Khan Academy, anything that can be quantitatively measured (quality of the measurement doesn't matter as each f value is completely independent of other f values)

- And we have a tech tree! You can choose the measurements that you want to optimize for and use it to prioritize your resources towards progress. Can also be used to intelligently guess at the inputs and outputs of progress in a specific goal

- Better for quantifying the current economy and scientifically deploying investment for the near future. The long term is obviously unpredictable (think https://twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/1278681124944793611), however can be used to analyze changes during previous paradigm shifts with historical data

- This is 99% dependent upon price signals (which I believe will be almost all of the useful data)