korrents

korrents · piece

Functional Institutions are the Exception

Samo Burja · 9 Jul 2018 · samoburja.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Samo Burja did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    A functioning institution is a rare exception and never grows by itself: it was assembled by a founder with good judgement.

    Their wordsAnd just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.
    Interesting

  2. Our reading

    Repairing a dysfunctional institution is harder than building a functional one from scratch, because its internal forces resist change and the dysfunction is hard to diagnose in the first place.

    Their wordsIt is much more difficult to make a dysfunctional institution functional than to create a functional institution from scratch; institutions will nearly always have internal forces that resist change, and diagnosing institutional dysfunction in the first place is challenging.
    Interesting