Institutional Failure as Surprise | Samo Burja

The fact that needed to be explained, however, was failure: the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance. The gap, I maintain, was a function of the limits of human knowledge. It had always been there. What changed was the public’s awareness of it.

A world with failing institutions may be survivable by the strong-willed, but a better world will always be one where strong institutions exist.

some institutions that seem “stagnant” are actually powerful forces for generating legitimacy. It being slow is the point, much in the same way that a song isn’t played as one chord. Music isn’t played to be finished. Much of the importance of modern institutions is to act as lightning rods for negotiation and conversation. If you are *only* a tech... See more

There is a common thread among these failures of prediction. In each case, as people evaluated the data, they ignored a key piece of context: The confidence that homeowners had about housing prices may have stemmed from the fact that there had not been a substantial decline in U.S. housing prices in the recent past. However, there had never before

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Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive insti... See more

To that haunting and recurrent question, despite vigorous investigation, no clear answer yet appears. Even Toynbee, floundering through his massive survey of 20-odd civilizations, was finally able to discern only that: SYSTEMS TEND TO MALFUNCTION CONSPICUOUSLY JUST AFTER THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH Toynbee explains this effect by pointing out the strong

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L. M. Sacasas

Solving a crisis by escalation seems not to have gone out of fashion. It signals, of course, a failure of imagination, but also an institutional imperative. What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending oper... See more