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This is: Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from? , published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong.
The United States has a bunch of nice things whose creation/maintenance requires coordinated effort from a large number of people across time. For example: bridges that stay up; electrical grids that provide us with power; the rule of law; newspapers that make it easier to keep tabs on recent events; fire fighting services that stop most fires in urban areas; roads; many functioning academic fields; Google; Amazon; grocery stores; the postal service; and so on.
The first question I'd like to pose is: how does this coordination work? What keeps these large sets of people pulling in a common direction (and wanting to pull in a common direction)? And what keeps that "common direction" grounded enough that an actual nice thing results from the pulling (e.g., what causes it to be that you get a working railway system, rather than a bunch of tracks that don't quite work? what causes you to sometimes get a functioning field of inquiry and not a cargo cult)? Is it that:
Many people independently value the nice thing, and they altruistically decide to put their own efforts toward creating/maintaining the nice thing? (E.g., some large set of people wishes there were good fire-fighting institutions, and so each of them altruistically and independently decides to found a fire-fighting branch, to work at that branch, to tweak that branch's habits into a more effective configuration, etc.?)
A small number of rich and powerful people (who are somehow also knowledgeable about institution design) value the nice thing, and they altruistically decide to set up incentives such that other people, purely via self-interest, will do the work that is needed to create/maintain the nice thing? (E.g., a small number of people altruistically donate to fire-fighting groups and set up incentives at those groups, and then other people do the fire-fighting work because they want a job?)
Something else?
One reason I’d like to pose this question is that it seems plausible to me that the magic that used to enable such cooperative institutions is fading. If so, it seems useful to know about that fading for quite a variety of reasons.
My own lead candidate answer to "what is the magic that lets these cooperative institutions run?" is this:
Somehow, people have sometimes known how to craft "institutional cultures" that aligned an individual's desire for (glory/$/prestige/etc.) with the actions that will allow the institution as a whole to acquire redistributable (glory, $, prestige, etc.) in the long run. More specifically, cooperative institutions arise in cases where some set of designers (either a few people, or a larger distributed set) magically manage several things at once:
There is an institutional culture that is distinct from the formal workings of the institution, but that exists alongside it, helping to animate it. For example, alongside the formal workings of the old NYT (the printing presses, newspaper subscriptions, staff payroll, explicit assignments, etc.) there was an ethic of journalism that helped direct staff actions at many junctures (an ethic of e.g. "all the news that's fit to print," putting in shoe-leather, protecting one's sources, etc.).
The installed "institutional culture" is pretty good at picking out actions that, if taken, will tend to cause the institution as a whole to gain redistributable (glory/$/prestige/etc.) in the long-term. In our example: The old NYT will in fact gain more long-run prestige, customers, incoming staff talent, etc. if it follows its journalistic ethics. In other words, the culture gestured at by ""all the news that's fit to print," putting in shoe-leather, protecting one's sources, etc." offered pretty good on-the-ground answers to the question ...
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