Re: “Top 10 Space Opera Books and Series”

Don wrote:

 Did Asimov and Campbell create _Foundation_'s psychohistory as an
allegory for Kenesian economics and Baconian scientism, without
realizing it?

According to Asimov, he was studying thermodynamics at the time and was struck by the fact that while we cannot predict the future behavior of a given molecule in a gas, we can predict the behavior of the gas itself to a great degree of precision.
While trying to think of a new idea for JWC he thought of the parallel - society being the gas, humans the molecules.  Could there be a parallel but more complex version of thermodynamics, which applied to large numbers of intelligent beings?
It seemed plausible enough for a story.  And also gave him a chance to bash the "Great Man" theories of history, which I believe he didn't like.
He was, or had recently, read Gibbon, and the idea of the decline and fall of such an empire meshed nicely with the above.  If you have such a science, what better way to use it (assuming for the sake of the plot that it was discovered too late to prevent the fall).
JWC was very keen on the idea, and proposed that it not be a story, but a chain of stories.
Aside from encouragement, JWC's main contribution was to insist that something happen not accounted for in Seldon's mathematics, thus at some point falsifying the predictions.  Asimov was reluctant to do this, but agreed and the Mule came into the picture.
I don't recall Asimov opining one way or another about economics in this context,  though he'd have been far better off had Keynes managed his stock portfolio, rather than the incompetents who did so.
William Hyde