They discuss Levin’s A Time to Build in a podcast. Levin says,
I think when reporters complain about Donald Trump–as they rightly do, in a lot of ways–they should think about whether what Trump is doing relative to what the Presidency is supposed to be isn’t very similar to what a lot of political reporters are doing relative to what journalism is supposed to be. They are engaging in a kind of indulgent performative version of the real thing that makes the real thing much harder to do.
There is a lot of interesting material here. I recommend the whole podcast.
My review is coming soon, so stay tuned. Preview: The book is either lame, wrong, or banal when it’s not wrong, or, in the alternative, a Straussian Masterpiece.
One thing to note is that he relies on Gallup’s confidence numbers, and the question that raises is how seriously should we take those numbers. For instance, the institution that Americans have rated very poorly consistently for almost 50 years is Big Business, with the “Very Little” score always exceeding those of “Great Deal” and “Quite a Lot” combined. (Aside: that’s also true for “Newspapers”, but only recently, with the turning point about 2007.)
But as regards Big Business, this is just total nonsense, because no other institution has performed better and more reliably during that period, constantly delivering more innovation and value to consumers all over the globe, as Cowen’s “Love Letter” describes in detail.
And it’s not just nonsense in terms of being detached from reality of which institutions deserve confidence, it’s also nonsense in terms of revealed preferences, in terms of into which institutions those consumers actually place their confidence as judged by their own actions and choices.
So, instead of “confidence” what we really seem to have with these Gallup numbers is mood affiliation, that is, the answer people give represents the mood they have been influenced to have, and which they think it is socially desirable to express, regarding a certain institution.
If the media keeps dumping on a certain institution, people will correctly perceive that everyone else thinks poorly of it too, and then align their own answers, even if they don’t actually adjust their own consumption patterns and decisions. Are Banks really less trustworthy / deservedly-confidence-inspiring now than they were 40 years ago? Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that in the aftermath of every cyclical loans crisis they are a handy target for demonization.
Consider “The Presidency”, which hit a low point in the last few years with Trump, right? Oh wait, no it didn’t. During Trump it’s in the mid to high 30’s. But during peak Bush Derangement Syndrome (interestingly, also 2007 – though probably due to the start of the housing / financial crisis), it was only 25, and Bush, not exactly the anti-Trump but close, didn’t tweet.
‘Big Business’ does have one advantage over other institutions. The leaders in Big Business can change over the decades and it is likely many of the ‘Big Business’ leaders of today will not be the popular Big Business of tomorrow. So will Amazon, Apple, Google, Wal-Mart and Target be leaders of tomorrow?
Who were the Big Business of 1970s?
Kodak
General Motors
IBM (So they are still respected)
Sears
Same as it ever was.
ENGLAND IN 1819
-PB Shelley
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,–
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,–
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,–
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,–
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,–
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,–
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,–
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
Thinking about local institutions and church attendance,
1) The historical highpoint of weekly attendance was 1960.
2) A variation of Klingism: If something you like is declining, then there must a reason for it.
So I still don’t understand why economical libertarians think local institutions that have been declining for 60 years would suddenly comeback and have any impact. In reality the early drops in local institutions, with 1960 as highpoint, was the Silent Generation moving away from them and it was the boomers, Gen X and millennials have followed similar paths. (Given the areas most suffering today as the Rust Belt really makes me wonder how they comeback.)
(FYI living in SoCal I have seen these local institution/church impacts here but they are usually centered around new Immigrant communities that struggle keeping their children and especially grandchildren participating instead of assimilating in the US culture.)
Yuval Levin’s “A Time To Build” is not arguing for the revival of American community like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”. As Kling opens in his review of the book Levin “argues that our institutions need to serve us better; but he argues even more strongly that we need to better serve our institutions.” The fact that Levin labels himself as a Burkean Conservative is misleading; his observations apply more to the Open Source Android project than to your local church. The Android project is a mold for how to build software of value; it is also molds the participants in a way that makes them better people.
An institution is any long-lived pattern of human organization defined by rules, roles, processes, and interactions. The Wikipedia community is an institution. Those that contribute are building something of much greater value than the sum of the individual contributions. Levin is saying that in many cases, such as the institution of Journalism, we are forgetting the importance of contributing to the institution and instead are using the institution as a platform for self-promotion.
A time to build is a time to recognize and contribute to these organizational patterns that capture our shared knowledge and experience. Build value, don’t play in its wake. That is my interpretation.
Wikipedia (or any other enterprise) is not an institution but an instance of an activity, carried out as an enterprise (or business, or company, or team), within the framework of institutional rules. There is a conflation of the dictionary definition of institution with that as proposed by Douglass North (Institutions, institutional change and economic performance, 1990) and others.
One contributes (contractually speaking) to the company one works for, which may include going beyond what is expected out of personal choice. This also means that one can use the company one works for to advance specific ideas though this would not mean misusing ‘the institution’ (in the sense of the institutional rules).
What is long-lived about the Wikipedia (or any other) community is the ability to continue operating as such supported by the accepted ‘rules of the games’ (North, again).
The institutional rules can be updated as the performance of individual instances of companies is continuously ‘assessed’, which is how they ‘contribute’ to the development of the institutional framework, though over much longer periods of time than for individual companies. One can be dismissed for underperforming in a current role for a specific contract (which may be adjusted for new hires based on this experience). The failure of this particular business, however, does not imply that the institutional framework will be revised (as a matter of fact, underperforming instances of companies fail precisely because this is in the institutional framework).
I’m confused. The first Douglas North paper on Institutions I found begins with the following:
I think the paper then focuses on institutions through an economic lens but the broad opening definition sounds exactly like what Yuval Levin is talking about. Is it Wikipedia itself that doesn’t fit with your understanding of what an institution is or is it my emphasis on institutions being long-lived that you object to? How can North’s definition be loose enough to include “taboos” but not the Wikipedia community?
The North citation is very apropos. Note that it refers to very broad and high-level concepts, not the specifics of any company or activity, though.
Wikipedia as an enterprise (or business or company) exists within the institutional framework (e.g., freedom of association, freedom of contract, ownership of assets, legal and constitutional frameworks) that gives rise to (as well as result from) people coming together and collaborating (or competing) with one another. In this sense we could be talking about Wikipedia, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the International Standardization Organization (ISO), Wendy’s, Fiat, etc. You would have the SfN, SfN, etc. ‘community’ of people contractually working there.
It is about the concepts (the institutions) at one level and the actual manifestations or reification of ideas or activities under these concepts.
From the above, you could have the ‘community’ of workers who enter a contract with Wikipedia and who ‘form’ it as a business by following high-level as well as specific rules.
By the same token, you would have taboos about incest or cannibalism that would guide people’s behaviors and social interactions. (That is, there is an institutional framework that regulates people’s interaction specifically for certain prohibitions, with incest or cannibalism being specific instances of behaviors that are regulated under this framework).
(It took me a while to get used to working around the common (mis-)use of the term ‘institutions’ as in ‘the banking institutions’, ‘the academic institutions’ when referring to ‘banks’ or ‘universities’, and so on, in the sense of companies. Unless one is discussing institutional concepts or rules, enterprises should be referred as such (i.e., enterprises or businesses or companies or teams).)
I see, you are making a distinction between the pattern and the instantiation of that pattern. In software it is the distinction between a Class and an instance of that Class that is called an Object. There is a common pattern used in software called a Singleton: a Class that is designed to be used as a single Object instance. Many human institutions share these characteristics; there is only a single manifestation of the unique institutional pattern.
I am struggling to think of why this narrow redefinition of the term institution is useful. In his book “A Time to Build”, Yuval Levin discusses the many different interpretations of the term “institution”. If you want to talk about the Singleton institutional pattern that is Wikipedia you can spell that out but since it is a Singleton we can use the name of the organization as the name of the institutional pattern without confusion.
Although the object-oriented instantiation in software development may be useful as an analogy, the meaning of institution here is that adopted in New Institutional Economics, the Austrian School of Economics, by Coase, Demsetz, North, Ostrom, Williamson and others.
Coase.org: https://www.coase.org/nieglossary.htm
EconLib Austrian School of Economics: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AustrianSchoolofEconomics.html
NIE at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_institutional_economics
I think this is driven by the long term trends towards specialization and compartmentalization of labor. We get major gains in productivity, but we are slowly becoming more and more opaque and less and less accountable to one another.
Isn’t this exactly what happens with specialization and compartmentalization of labor?
We are exactly accountable to the next person who depends on the inputs provided by our outputs.
We meet ‘halfway’ during an exchange: on one side there is someone with the capability to produce what is required, and on the other side there is the other person with the capability to use that thing. Both need to agree right at the interface or point of exchange that what one wants is what the other is delivering, which is when there is accountable exchange.
I am writing up an essay/review of the interview as well. I was really struck by how much Levin had a mechanical view of institutions as opposed to organic, seemingly believing that there is no life cycle of institutions. I also was rather surprised that he (and almost everyone else, in his defense) seems to wonder if we ever should have trusted experts and their institutions in the first place. It seems to me we might now be towards the end of a 150 year version of the Emperor’s New Cloths, where people are starting to realize that most experts are functionally useless, unable to deliver the promises their rule began with.
He seems NOT to wonder if we should trust experts. Having a bad day typing.