The highest-quality organizations today (not sure if they’re “institutions”) are the big companies like Amazon and Google. By “high quality” I mean they create lots of value, with a high value-per-(IQ-weighted)-employee ratio.
Any institution that does a big job, like government, has lots of leverage on the brainpower of its members and should be able to create lots of value. E.g. a few smart people empowered to design a new government healthcare system could potentially create a $trillion of value. But the for-profit companies are basically the only ones who actually do consistently leverage the brainpower and create $trillions of value. This is because they’re the only ones who make a sustained effort to win the bidding war for brainpower, and manage it with sufficiently tight feedback cycles.
Another example of a modern high-quality institution that comes to mind, which isn’t a for-profit company, is Wikipedia. Admittedly no one is bidding money for that talent, so my model would predict that Wikipedia should suffer a brain drain, and in fact I do think my model explains why the percentage of people who are motivated to edit Wikipedia is low. But it seems like there’s a small handful of major Wikipedia editors addicted to doing it as a leisure activity. The key to Wikipedia working well without making its contributors rich is that the fundamental unit of value is simple enough to have a tight feedback loop, so that it can lodge in a few smart people’s mind as an “addictive game”. You make an edit and it’s pretty clear whether you’ve followed the rule of “improve the article in some way”. Repeat, and watch your reputation score (number of edits, number of article views) tick steadily up.
So my model is that successful institutions are powered by smart people with reward feedback loops that keep them focused on a mission, and companies are attracting almost all the smart people, but there are still a few smart people pooled in other places like Wikipedia which use a reward feedback loop to get lots of value from the brainpower they have.
Re subcultures and hobby groups: I don’t know, I don’t even have a sense of whether they’re on an overall trend of getting better or worse.
The highest-quality organizations today (not sure if they’re “institutions”) are the big companies like Amazon and Google. By “high quality” I mean they create lots of value, with a high value-per-(IQ-weighted)-employee ratio.
Any institution that does a big job, like government, has lots of leverage on the brainpower of its members and should be able to create lots of value. E.g. a few smart people empowered to design a new government healthcare system could potentially create a $trillion of value. But the for-profit companies are basically the only ones who actually do consistently leverage the brainpower and create $trillions of value. This is because they’re the only ones who make a sustained effort to win the bidding war for brainpower, and manage it with sufficiently tight feedback cycles.
Another example of a modern high-quality institution that comes to mind, which isn’t a for-profit company, is Wikipedia. Admittedly no one is bidding money for that talent, so my model would predict that Wikipedia should suffer a brain drain, and in fact I do think my model explains why the percentage of people who are motivated to edit Wikipedia is low. But it seems like there’s a small handful of major Wikipedia editors addicted to doing it as a leisure activity. The key to Wikipedia working well without making its contributors rich is that the fundamental unit of value is simple enough to have a tight feedback loop, so that it can lodge in a few smart people’s mind as an “addictive game”. You make an edit and it’s pretty clear whether you’ve followed the rule of “improve the article in some way”. Repeat, and watch your reputation score (number of edits, number of article views) tick steadily up.
So my model is that successful institutions are powered by smart people with reward feedback loops that keep them focused on a mission, and companies are attracting almost all the smart people, but there are still a few smart people pooled in other places like Wikipedia which use a reward feedback loop to get lots of value from the brainpower they have.
Re subcultures and hobby groups: I don’t know, I don’t even have a sense of whether they’re on an overall trend of getting better or worse.