People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

People are using institutions as platforms

Being Elite should be painful

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

Week of 26 July 2020

# §Institutions and Games
### What are Institutions
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]
- [[There are two levels of institution]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]
- [[Individual actions reflect on Institutions]]
- [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]
- [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]
- Institutions have [[Institutional scar tissue]]
- [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]
- [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]

### Institutions working well or badly
- [[Market failures are actually failures of the existing institutions to allow markets to work]]
-  [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]
- [[“Have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Lowering barriers to entry is clutch for healthy institutions]]

### Games
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Fair games are self-limiting]]
- [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]]
- [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]]
- [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]
- [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]
- [[Relative vs absolute games]] ::needs work::
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]]
- [[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]]

### Different Games in the World
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

### Questions
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]]
- [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]
- [[Why aren’t people building more institutions?]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]

### References
- [[Venkatesh Rao thread on institution building]]
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media]]
- [[Finite and Infinite Games]]



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# ‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society 
*Everybody* wants to play a game with no tradeoffs. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. 

In the past all ‘life games’ had perceived tradeoffs.  If you were nobility or wealthy, you traded off religious purity (“It is harder for a wealthy man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”) If you were royalty, you were expected to be at the greatest risk of physical death. If you were clergy, you were supposed to renounce earthly possessions. Merchants could accumulate great wealth, but had little political power. The idea of these tradeoffs is built into western culture. Of course, the reality often differed from the ideal - Popes accumulating great wealth, Kings buying indulgences etc. but the *idea* that this was wrong is still powerful because it means the system would regress to a mean that enforced the tradeoffs. [[Having more separate games is good for society]].

Life-game tradeoffs were the perceived norm in the 20th century as well. Scientists could achieve great acclaim, but didn’t make that much money. Businessmen could make lots of money but weren’t held in great esteem. Politicians had power but it was understood that they wouldn’t make much money.  Journalists kept everybody in check but claimed few of the spoils.

Now, it seems like the winners in all the categories bleed into each other and everybody is now playing a single game where you can have your cake and eat it too. No tradeoffs. Famous scientists start companies and become fabulously wealthy. Politicians leverage their positions to get paid a ton by lobbyists and speaking tours. Successful entrepreneurs are also celebrities and can now pivot to whatever they want - science, politics, entertainment. 

The two questions that demand answers are “why did this happen” and “why is this bad?” 

### Why is this bad?

Shifting to the evolutionary analogy the single societal game breaks down the group selection hierarchy. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. It would be like all the cells of all the animals in the world all of a sudden competing with each other. It breaks the brain a little to think about. Is it a return to a primordial ooze? A [gelatinous cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatinous_cube)? Some kind of [ooze monster](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/89/99/ce/8999ce8a21742d46e495c4e90c9605ce.jpg)where all the animals have melded together? ![](BearImages/6EAB3C07-08C0-43F8-91B3-44D37E5A5850-32352-00033E8E7EF8DCFB/8999ce8a21742d46e495c4e90c9605ce.jpg)

Regardless, a single game means that every individual is competing with every other individual, which removes all the advantages of group selection, especially the [[Slack - concept]] to work on things that are not immediately valuable.  

You could also look at the situation as every individual now being a member of every institution, which might be more accurate. Everybody is in business, everybody is a journalist, everybody is a scientist. We’ve been conditioned to think this is a good thing - democratize all the things. I think that would be true *if* people learned and respected the rules of whichever institutional capacity they were acting in and could firewall between the different roles in their lives. Instead it’s all become mushed together (see ooze monster picture.) This admonition to firewall between different roles in the same person is never going to be followed perfectly but it is an ideal that is no longer being strived for at all. 

For example, Ben Franklin was a man of *many* institutions: business, journalism, science, politics. He did a poor job firewalling between his role as a businessman and his role as a journalist - using kind of sketchy business practices to force competitors out of business. However, as far as I can tell, he *didn’t* use his position as a journalist to push his scientific theories or his position in politics to enhance his business. So there was at least some personal fireballing going on. Additionally, he knew and respected the rules of the different games he was playing. So while he was in many institutions he did not break down the barriers between them. 

When everybody wants to be an ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘influencer’ regardless of what they actually want, it increases the noise in the system and basically creates a lottery. A toxic situation. 

### Why did this happen?
Some of these reasons will inevitably overlap with [[Most institutions have become cancerous]].  It’s also interesting that many of these points are the tails side of a coin - they can be seen as good things as well. 
1. Social media and the internet enabled people to start participating in different institutions - politics, science, journalism - without any sort of introduction to what the rules of the game were. Again, lowering barriers to entry, in and of itself is not a bad thing, but without an additional … *something* (learning? Guidance?) it breaks down the walls between the institutions and creates a single game. 
2. The internet enabled people to not only participate but become major players in a game without needing to pass through any gatekeepers. Again, in a way this is a good thing, but the benefit of gatekeepers is that they can ensure that rules are at least understood before they are broken. It also causes a situation where anybody can try to set themselves up as a gatekeeper. [[Full-time thought leaders try to become gatekeepers to knowledge]]. My sense is that some sort of stability of gatekeeper succession is a good thing. 
3. *Fuzzy* An increasing sense that all institutional games should be fair, and therefore legible to people outside the institution. [[Fair games have legible rules]].  Legible rules made people inside the institution directly answerable to everyone outside of it.  This all sounds good so far! Light is the best disinfectant! However, the exposed rules could not capture all of the implicit rules of the game ([[The Map is not the Territory]])  so all the players are now incentivized to optimize for whatever those legible rules are and ignore all of the illegible rules. This leads to scientists chasing citations and politicians saying “well it’s not strictly illegal!”
4. Institutional democratization created a common currency between institutions: attention. If you can amass a large enough group of followers, people in other institutions will take you seriously. Thus, everybody is now playing the attention game. 

### Related
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], which used to create ‘firewalls’ between different games but [[Most institutions have become cancerous]] so everything bleeds together.
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies]]
- https://twitter.com/ArtirKel/status/1284940928805994497



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Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things

§Institutions and Games

Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution

# Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?
We’ve lost trust and confidence in institutions. We hope that people in institutions act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions but increasingly that’s no longer the case. It’s almost a tautology to say that the people in those institutions no longer have incentives to act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions. 

It doesn’t seem like people in institutions have very many incentives to uphold the mission and purpose of the institution. Without their career, power, wealth, etc. being tied to that mission and purpose even good rational people will act out of line with the institution’s mission and purpose.  These people have no [[Skin in the game (SITG)]] in aligning their actions with the institutional purpose. Note how [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]. 

So what if you literally put rules in place that asked whether someone’s actions were in line with the institutional mission and goals? The more extreme version would look like asking whether someone’s actions were the ones that *maximized* the institutions societal goals. The extreme version seems like a good idea because it’s straightforward to that there are actions which are to some degree in line with institutional missions that in aggregate erode the institution. For example a regulator favoring his buddy’s company over one that makes superior products. Without the maximization criteria, favoritism is arguably ok as long as the buddy’s company is not actively going against institutional purpose. It’s much more straightforward to ask “given the possible actions, did this person take the action that contributed maximally the institutional purpose?” 

Institutional SITG would look like  firing and disgracing a journalist because they took an action that didn’t maximize societal sense-making.  

Institutional SITG would require pre-agreeing on the role of an institution. The debate over the role of the institution pops the debate to a higher level leverage point ([[Leverage Points — Places to intervene in a system]]) where you’re arguing about the  goal of a system instead of people in the system. Hopefully this discussion would move us away from the fact that [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]].

This debate would also be useful because it would enable us to precisely call out which institutions had multiple conflicting missions.  For example, [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]. It is probably too much to ask that each institution have only orthogonal missions. 

It raises the question what are the purposes and missions of most [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]

### Related
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]



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New institutions need champions

How do you have an institution that avoids asymmetric career risk and going rogue in a world where everybody is a free agent?

# Individual actions reflect on Institutions
At the end of the day [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]]. As humans, we attribute the aggregate actions of the people in an organization to the organization as a whole.  [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], but individuals also shape everything about an institution through their actions. 

When the aggregate action of individuals go against an institution’s perceived mission ([[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]) people start to lose trust in that institution. If it goes on long enough this eroded trust weakens the institution’s ability to shape how individuals interact, which leads to more individuals going against the institution’s perceived mission, creating a feedback loop that rips the institution apart.

An institution can prevent the self-destructive feedback loop by making an example of the individual.  If you publicly expunge the individual from the institution, it shows people outside the institution that the institution can police itself. However, modern institutions don’t seem to be expunging people who fail in their institutional role [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]], but *are* expunging people who violate extra-institutional rules. These expunging may confuse the rules of the institutional game ([[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]) and reduce trust both inside the institution and outside.  ([[The more trust an institution has, the less it needs formal process]])

Weirdly I think this harkens to [[Girardian scapegoating]]. 

The reflection of individual actions on institutions is one reason why [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]. If it’s unclear who’s in the institution, it’s unclear who reflects on it.

### Related
- [[Specialization and comparative advantage are related but not the same thing]]



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Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk

Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions

Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave

The ability to say ‘huh that’s funny’ is important for discovering new phenomena

Yuval Levin

People do not like conforming to external structures

Incentives are the fundamental forces of peopleland

DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Reaper functions dominate other incentives

You need to break rules to create new paradigms

Gabriel Licina

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Grants only go so far

People use a few members of a category to stand for the whole

‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society

Assertions

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# Institutions shape how individuals interact
Institutions primarily shape how individuals interact by setting up rules for games. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]

At the same time [[People do not like conforming to external structures]], so there is always some inherent tension between individual incentives and institutional rules. However the goal of the rules is to get everyone to a better equilibrium by creating a shared set of rules that can themselves compete -  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. 

Institutions both shape how individuals interact *within* an institution but also how individuals interact *between institutions.* 

 The ‘within institution’ context includes both interactions within an organization, but also within Level II institutions like ‘The Media.’  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. The former is company culture, while the latter is fuzzy things like ‘journalistic ethics’ or ‘honor.’ 

‘Between institution’ interactions are our expectations and perceptions of individuals knowing that they are part of an institution. You have a different expectation of a police officer, journalist, and professor knowing nothing but their profession[^1] and there may be different spoken or unspoken rules around interactions.  Most people respond differently when a police officer asks them to do something than when a non-police officer asks the same thing, or when a journalist asks for an interview.  These expectations from outside the institution are based on the perceived role of the institution. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. 

A lot of how institutions shape how individuals interact between institutions is tied up with someone acting in their institutional role. When an individual acts ‘in an institutional role’ they basically become an avatar of that institution. They are imbued with that institution’s power and reputation - both good and bad. Any action they take reflects not on them, but on the institution as a whole. 

Drawing a line between someone acting in an institutional role and as an individual is the tricky piece. At the end of the day, an institutional avatar and an individual are the same physical human, so distinguishing between the two is an act of imagination.  It might even be a [[Load Bearing Fiction]]. In the relatively easy cases, uniforms and shifts distinguish people between their institutional and individual roles: an officer in uniform represents the department and a waiter on shift represents the restaurant. The line between institution and individual just becomes murkier from there until you get to someone like the Queen of England who is *always* in her institutional role. But even when ideally the uniform is a bright line, the real line is not so clear: there are implicit institutional expectations on individuals 24/7. 

Part of these constant expectations are conduct based: there are standards you expect individuals in different institutional roles to obey regardless of whether they are embodying the institutional avatar or not. In a way, these are almost purity standards that determine whether the individual is *worthy* of embodying the avatar. But a bookmark in this notion of purity. Politicians having sex scandals is the classic example here. 

Part of these constant expectations are based on the fact that the institutional avatar and the individual are never truly separated. This incomplete separability is why many people think professors should not have relationships with their students. In a more clear cut situation, the student could be using the relationship to get better grades or the student could feel subtlety coerced.  Even if they both are truly attracted to each other, relationships can end, people an act poorly in response to breakups, and the professor still controls a lever of power. Note that the stronger the individual norms on institutional behavior, the less you need institutional rules mediating behavior. In an extreme case, if all professors would never ever ever let anything affect grades besides the quality of the work, then you need less strict rules about relationships between professors and students. As soon as one professor breaks this standard though, the institution tightens rules on all the professors. Shifting from norms to explicit rules like this creates [[Institutional scar tissue]]. 

The incomplete separability of avatar and individual also shapes how people interact because people *know* that the separability is incomplete. People will treat people with power differently even when they are playing golf or posting about something totally unrelated to their job on twitter. 

Which brings us to two big ways that the ways that institutions have shaped how individuals interact have changed. 
1. [[The post-consensus world has fractured norms]]. These fractured norms especially affected the expectations of where the line lies between acting as an institutional avatar and an individual as well as which individual behaviors reflect back onto the institutional role. Purity is almost taboo to talk about, but there is now strong disagreement over what makes someone too impure to be an institutional avatar. 
2. [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]

### Related 
- Ideas of Innovation and Invention from [[Lever of Riches]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]

[^1]: Of course, it’s important note which expectations are  institutionally imposed vs. just correlated with people in the institutions, like the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. *However* even that is complicated, because institutions tend to encourage or at least shelter these traits. If someone had some absent-minded tendencies and went into, say, hedge funds, they may have suppressed them while as a professor they let them flourish. This institutional trait-encouragement may be nothing more than the reenforcement from keeping a bunch of people with the same trait in the same place and [[You are the average of the five people you spend the most time around]] doing its work. But since [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]], ‘enhancing traits by getting a bunch of people with similar traits together in the same place’ is a reasonable, if mundane, mechanism by which institutions can reasonably shape how individuals interact. 



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The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation

Fair games are self-limiting

Peer review has failed as an institution

Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game

Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission

Philanthropists want things to become sustainable

Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability

Why aren’t people building more institutions?

Getting to new optima is hard

Palladium Podcast

Experience does not mean expertise

# Most institutions have become cancerous
 Let’s look at this assertion through the lens of evolutionary theory and group selection.   [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].   [^1]

Cells become cancerous when they stop following the rules that all the cells in the organism follow. In this case, the organism is the higher of two levels of a group selection system. One of the [[Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay]] is that individuals are prioritizing themselves over their institutional mission. [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]].  

Organizations are weird because they are default alive instead of default dead once they reach a certain size.  [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]

To further the analogy between cancer, organisms, institutions, and individuals: cancer develops when cells no longer experience senescence. [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]] - which basically is a cancer on the Level II institution. If the Level II institution is functioning well, it forces the organization to either die or continue to support the goals of the level II institution.  So if we’re seeing a proliferation of cancerous Level I institutions, it means that something has gone wrong with the Level II institutions. 

Here I’m going to go off-roading for a bit: hopefully we’ll find our way back.  Level II institutions seem to have experienced a divergence between their  implicit, explicit, and perceived missions. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].  Why has this happened? There are many explanations that will appeal to different people based on their values and beliefs. 
- Societally, we’ve shifted towards focusing on the importance of the individual over the importance of the institution. This has been helped by the internet removing gatekeepers and giving everybody a voice. Gatekeeping used to be one of the ways that institutions kept individuals in line. 
- Individuals and institutions no longer agree on what the rules one level up the hierarchy *are*. If you dig into it, I suspect that people on different ideological teams actually have different perceived missions of different Level II institutions. This is not inherently a problem in the group-selection model, as long as those different perceptions can compete against some agreed upon fitness function. The problem is that there is no consensus fitness function all the way up. The extreme version of this is the [[Post-consensus world]].
- In business at least, the missions diverged over the idea of “maximizing shareholder value.” Most people perceive businesses to have missions other than just maximizing shareholder value, so if their explicit mission becomes maximizing shareholder value their perceived and explicit missions have diverged. 
- There are fewer resources in the system (less growth) which intensifies competition between Level I institutions and individuals. ie. There’s less [[Slack - concept]]  in the system.  It’s easy to align all your missions when there’s lots of resources to play around with. And since the group selection rules in the Level II institutions were set up in a high-growth world, they were not set up with the teeth to assert themselves when they run up against the incentives of a low-growth world.  ([[Expended list of WTF happened in 1971 and afterwards]]) 

This note was originally titled ‘Most institutions have metasized.’ [[Noah Tye]] noted [That word doesn’t mean what you think it means](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg).  It means that a cancer has spread to multiple sites around an organism. However that may actually be true. There isn’t just one Level I institution where the individuals have stopped following institutional rules. It feels like *all* the Level I institutions in many Level II institutions have this problem. One newspaper starts going for clicks instead of sense and other newspapers follow suit. 

### Related
- [[Load Bearing Fiction]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability]]

[^1]: I have very little actual knowledge and training in evolutionary theory so this is mostly just made up hackwork but it feels explanatory and self-consistent enough to be worthwhile mental kindling for different ways to think about real phenomena. 



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Most institutions have become cancerous

Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?

Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay

# Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role 
# Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role 
Instead, people are resigning or forced out for things orthogonal to their institutional role - sex, money things etc.

[[If you buy that the role of public corporations is to maximize value for their shareholders, they are one of the only institutions that are consistently living up to their purpose and mission]].  

### Tweet
[Ben Reinhardt on Twitter: “On that note - when was the last time anybody resigned for failing at their role in an institution?As opposed to something orthogonal… https://t.co/Pd9RJIDKmG”](https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1244350864938196993?s=20)

### Related
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]



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# Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay
- Individuals acting against the ‘code of ethics’ of their industry 
- Institutions prioritizing things outside of their mission over their institutional mission. Fame, money, power, politics, etc. 
- Individuals prioritizing themselves over their institutional mission
- Institutions are not delivering on their perceived goals
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]



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Life Style Guide

Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

Creating an organizational structure around a project prematurely can have many downsides

Trusted Hierarchies are one way that centralized coordination can happen

# Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things
The direct consequence of this is that one should never put a verb in front of an inanimate object. This may be too extreme: Is it actually better to say “People have used computer simulations for discovery …” than “Computer simulations have aided in discovery …?”

[[Human brains put all entities in the same bucket]]

### Related
- [[Life Style Guide]]
- Inspired by [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]]



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# Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution
Is there any difference between a reformer and a heretic besides the fact that one is kicked out of an institution and the other manages to stay with it long enough to change it? Both have divergent policy ideas. 

There also might be something around heretics being actively hunted, while outcasts are just ignored. 

Institutions have different tolerance for divergent opinions and are more or less open to change. Four quadrants
- High Openess to divergent opinion, high openess to change: Reformers thrive
- High Openess to divergent opinion, low openness to change: frustrated potential reformers lead on their own
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, High Openness to change: Lots of meaningless changes, lots of heretics
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, low openness to change: lots of heretics 

### Related 
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]



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Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories

What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?

NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis

Dinner 16 Jun 2021

# The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation
As a culture we tend to assume an institution will keep existing by default. It’s “sad” if a company goes out of business, a department is shut down, etc. People associated with the institution are incentivized to keep it alive and prestigious. It looks much better to be a former employee of a rich and powerful company than a fallen one. 

The incentives to keep an institution alive regardless of its outcomes is made worse in situations where it’s hard to fire people. Permanent employees can become people whose comfortable jobs are dependent only on the institution continuing to exist rather than achieving anything. And since people tend to bring on people like themselves ([[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]) eventually all the people in the institution will become like that the same way volatile gas boils off and leaves more sedate gas. It’s generally harder to fire people in the government so this phenomena is especially apparent in governments. 

Philanthropies dedicated to a specific mission become caught in a trap where they can eliminate their own reason for existing.  Sub-optimal monopolies are the business world instantiation of this phenomena. 

It’s possible that default temporary members of an institution can help combat this phenomenon. Universities have managed to stay pretty constant for hundreds of years [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]] possibly because professors had to be graduate students before that. [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] and [[Publishing feels more like hardware development than software development]] has managed to stay high quality for decades.

This may have been the founding fathers’ thought behind the temporary congresspeople and executives in the United States government. Sadly, the US government also demonstrates that the temporary nature is clearly not sufficient. Could you make an argument that the ratio of elected to unelected people in the government shifted and led to the change? The same has been true in universities - the number of people who weren’t default temporary graduate students have exploded. 

This note was originally `The default state of a government entity is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation - very hard to fire people` but it’s actually true of large businesses and philanthropies as well. 

Is this related to why people stay in bad marriages and relationships?

### Related
- [[What if everything had an expiration date or term limits?]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]]
- [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]





From [[Mark McGranaghan]]

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Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role

People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does

What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?

Disintermediation destroys institutions and leads to winner take all

Great Founder Theory - Article

Progress Studies 2020-03-28

# Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk
- Institutions enable people to act collectively (2:20)
- Hugh Heclo tried to write down all the definitions of institution and stopped at 100 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Institutionally-Politics-Hugh-Heclo/dp/0199946000
- We’ve lost both trust and confidence in institutions 
	- The difference between trust and confidence is relevant
- Institutions mold and form people into forms that conform to the purpose of the insititution
	- People don’t like to be molded and formed
- We hope that people in institutions act in line with the purpose and mission of institutions but more and more that is no longer the case
- Institutions have nominal organizational goals
- Insiderism is when people use an institution as cover for bad behavior. This is corruption and has always happened and is different than the phenomenon we see now
- People are using institutions as platforms (14:28)
	- The example is the professor who just uses the university as a platform to publicize his research
- example - media has set of ethics consistent with informing you about the truth
	- [Yuval Levin on A Time to Build — EconTalk — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/09:57)
- Jarring when people do things inconsistent with what you thought their job was - need a word for this and with orgs
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/11:11
- It’s about expectations 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/11:39
- Confirming to expectations 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/13:29
- People using institutions as platforms instead of molds
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/14:28
- Researchers see themselves as self employed 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/17:58
- Don’t use verbs after non human thjnfs
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/18:34
- Conservative progressive difference on whether people need to change 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/20:51
- Institutions have changed regardless of if you think it’s good or bad 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/20:51
- Institutions have become performarive instead of formative 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/22:03
- Profession gives people a method and a form
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/23:40
- Trump doing to presidency what journalists are doing to journalism
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:39
- Free rider problem in institutions 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:56
- Thing that has changed is willingness of people in power to punish freeriders
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/26:39
- Fragmentation if media has turned us all into our own paparazzi and micro celebrities
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/29:57
- Congress becoming a performstive instituion
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/32:28
- Free rider problem in institutions 
https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:56
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]

### Published
Feb 2020
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Russ Roberts]]
- [[Yuval Levin]]
## Link
[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build — EconTalk — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/)

[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Yuval_Levin_on_A_Time_to_Build_-_Econtalk)

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Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role

Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role

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