For fun, I decided to take PolicyMaker for a test drive. I asked the program to tell me how to persuade Harvard University to hand over a small chunk of its mammoth $ 14 billion endowment to the poor communities in nearby Roxbury and South Boston. Miraculously, after I plugged in all the "players"…

PolicyMaker 2.2 TM is a jazzy new computer program devised by Harvard University professor Michael Reich. Selling for just under $ 100, this Nintendo-style spreadsheet -- which bills itself as the latest in "computer-assisted political analysis" (CAPA) -- has entered the curriculum at schools of…