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What even is an institution?

vitalik.eth.limo · 2,210 words · saved by 8 readers

A recent alternative political compass proposed by Dennis Pourteaux proposes that the most important political divide of our present time is not liberty vs authoritarianism or left vs right, but rather how we think about "institutions". Are the institutions that society runs on today good or bad, and is the solution to work incrementally to improve them, replace them with radically different institutions, or do away with institutions altogether? This, however, raises a really important question: what even is an "institution" anyway? The word "institution" in political discourse brings to mind things like national governments, the New York Times, universities and maybe the local public library. But the word also gets used to describe other kinds of things. The phrase "the institution of marriage" is common in English-language discourse, and gets over two million search results on Google. If you ask Google point-blank, "is family an institution", it answers yes. ChatGPT agrees: If we tak

Dark Mode Toggle What even is an institution? 2022 Dec 30 See all posts What even is an institution? Special thanks to Dennis Pourteaux and Tina Zhen for discussion that led to this post. A recent alternative political compass proposed by Dennis Pourteaux proposes that the most important political divide of our present time is not liberty vs authoritarianism or left vs right, but rather how we think about "institutions" . Are the institutions that society runs on today good or bad, and is the solution to work incrementally to improve them, replace them with radically different institutions, or

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