Transparency & Methodology
How We Work
AI-assisted analysis. Austrian economic principles. Radical transparency.
THE MOMENT WE'RE IN
AI is improving at a pace that was considered impossible just years ago. Week by week, new capabilities emerge that redefine what machines can reason about.
Frontier models now solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems at gold-medal level. They have recently cracked Erdős conjectures that stumped mathematicians for decades. These are not incremental improvements — they are genuine leaps in the capacity for rigorous reasoning.
We believe it is time this reasoning power was turned toward one of the most consequential domains of all: governance.
For too long, the complexity of public budgets, the opacity of spending decisions, and the labyrinthine nature of policy trade-offs have served as a de facto shield for waste, inefficiency, and politically convenient obfuscation. Most citizens cannot read a 43 781 Mrd Ft budget. Most journalists cannot cross-reference 42 chapters of line items against a coherent economic framework. This complexity is not neutral — it protects those who benefit from it.
AI changes this equation. Not by making decisions for us — it cannot and should not. Democratic legitimacy rests on human choice, human values, and human accountability. But AI can now do what no human team previously could: read everything, apply a consistent analytical framework to every line item, model the consequences of every proposed change, and present the results in a form that citizens, journalists, and policymakers can actually engage with.
AI cannot tell us what we should value. But it can show us — with unprecedented clarity and rigour — the short and long-term consequences of the choices we make.
In a democracy, that is enough to change everything.
Why AI?
A New Scale of Scrutiny
Hungary's 2026 central budget runs to thousands of line items across 42 chapters. Until recently, the kind of chapter-by-chapter, item-by-item rigorous analysis this requires would demand a team of dozens of economists working for months — far beyond the means of any independent civil society organisation. AI changes this equation entirely.
The Szabad Társadalom Kutatóintézet uses a multi-agent AI pipeline — a coordinated system of specialised analytical models — to read the raw budget data, apply a consistent Austrian economic framework to every single line item, and produce detailed analyses, structured data, and policy recommendations. What would once have taken months now takes days. What was once possible only for large state-funded institutions is now possible for a small independent team committed to the public interest.
We believe this is the future of policy analysis: not AI replacing human judgment, but AI enabling human analysts to operate at a scale and consistency previously unimaginable.
Our Framework
The Framework We Chose — and Why
Every analysis rests on a framework, whether declared or not. Most government budget documents embed Keynesian assumptions without acknowledging them. We choose to declare ours explicitly: we analyse Hungary's budget through the lens of the Austrian School of Economics — the tradition of Mises, Hayek, Bastiat, and Ricardo.
We chose this framework because we believe it is the one that most accurately explains how nations become and remain prosperous. Its core insights — that prices coordinate information no central planner can possess; that government spending displaces private investment; that interventions create unintended consequences that compound over time; that economic calculation requires genuine market signals — are not ideological preferences but observations confirmed by a century of comparative economic history.
This does not make our analysis partisan. We apply the framework consistently, regardless of which government proposed a given expenditure or which constituency benefits from it. The framework is the lens; the data is the object; the analysis follows from both.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Our Claims
What We Claim — and What We Don't
We do not claim objectivity in an absolute sense — all analysis involves choices of framework, emphasis, and interpretation. What we do claim is consistency and transparency:
Consistency
The same analytical framework is applied to every chapter, every ministry, every line item. There are no political favourites and no protected sacred cows.
Transparency
Our methodology is documented here. Our source data is Hungary's official published budget. Our analytical pipeline is described openly. Our conclusions are traceable back to specific line items.
Limitations
Not every figure in our analyses has been manually verified against the primary source document. We use automated extraction and AI-assisted interpretation. Rounding errors, misclassifications, and occasional misreads are possible. We work to minimise these through automation and cross-checks, but we cannot guarantee zero errors.
We actively welcome corrections. If you find a factual error — a wrong figure, a misclassified item, a misread policy — please contact us. We will review and correct promptly. Rigorous debate, including challenge to our numbers, is exactly what we hope to stimulate.
The Hard Truth
Truth and What Is Politically Digestible
Progress in democratic societies hinges on a narrow and difficult balance: between what is true and what is politically digestible. Economic reforms that would produce large long-term gains often impose concentrated short-term costs on identifiable groups. The incentive structure of democratic politics systematically underweights diffuse future benefits and overweights immediate visible costs.
We are fully aware of this tension. We do not pretend that publishing a rigorous budget analysis will immediately transform policy. What we believe is that it is through the persistent accumulation of understanding — through data, explanation, and open debate — that the Overton window shifts. That what is politically unthinkable today becomes thinkable tomorrow, and eventually inevitable.
Our demographic briefs are an explicit attempt to address this: for each group affected by proposed reforms, we try to give an honest account of both the short-term disruption and the long-term benefit. We do not minimise hardship. We try to explain why we believe the trajectory leads somewhere better.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."
— F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Open Correction
Help Us Be Better
We believe in open correction. If you find an error in any of our analyses — a wrong figure, misclassified expenditure item, or factual mistake — we want to know. Send corrections to: info@szabadtarsadalom.hu
Email corrections to:
info@szabadtarsadalom.huWe review all submissions and will publish corrections with attribution where appropriate.
Szabad Társadalom Kutatóintézet
Help Us Go Further
If you value transparent, AI-assisted policy analysis — support the work. Every contribution keeps the research independent and free to access.