“ Markets were never intended to be anarchic: It has always been government’s role to police standards, weights and measures, and records, and not condone legalized sleight of hand in the shadows of the informal economy. To understand and repair one of mankind’s greatest achievements—the creation of economic facts through public memory—is the stuff of nation-builders.”
— Hernando de Soto on The Destruction of Economic Facts (via MR)
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Posts tagged with institutions
The Problem with Paper
A meditation on real world institutions and (implicit but unmodeled) sequential games. Perhaps the best post on game theory you’ll read all day.
Found via Stellar.
A Slow (Non-Majoritarian) Parade
Of course most people only care about the policy and not the sausage factory floor, but it sure seems like we’ve recently watched a long parade of pundits decry the filibuster and opine that the US Senate is broken.
Maybe it’s obvious, but if you can’t handle Wisconsin, you surely can’t handle a 51-vote Senate. Seth Masket sums it up: “What happened in WI wasn’t a coup. It was unified government.”
The Invention of Money
This American Life Episode #423 (via Tim Hartford by way of MR). Suitable for the classroom. Or the virtual online classroom as the case may be.
Bad Calls In Baseball
Joe Posnanski argues that technology has eroded legitimacy. I can’t help but see parallels to Youtube style gotcha moments in contemporary politics.
“ It might be that the Senate of 2010 is the perfect Senate. But it’s not the Senate that the Founders created, and it’s not a Senate that’s been preserved in amber for the past 100 years. It’s an institution in a continual state of flux. Going back to the Senate that the Founders envisioned would require a more radical series of reforms than anything currently being contemplated.”
— Ezra Klein
“ Count the economic collapse of Greece as an intellectual victory for Douglass North and his brand of ‘institutions matter’ economics.”
— Tyler Cowen
Costs of the Supermajority Senate
Among other things, Ezra Klein argues that the filibuster contributes to legicide: “It encourages Congress to outsource its responsibilities to independent commissions, the executive branch and its associated agencies, and the courts…”
Organizational & Cultural Change
“81 Words” from This American Life is an incredible story about the American Psychiatric Association ending their practice of defining homosexuality as a mental illness. I listened to it as a case study on how definitions can become powerful institutions and how those institutions can be changed. Highly recommended.
Understanding the Filibuster
On NPR’s Fresh Air, political scientist Greg Koger explains the politics involving the Senate’s filibuster rule and how maybe possibly potentially (and probably why not) it could be changed (via The Monkey Cage).
