The first half is fine, but replace “altruistically” with “selfishly”.… They figure out how to make a living… [emphasis mine]
At first glance, if we’re talking about a thing that requires cooperative effort from many people across time, this seems like a heck of a principal agent problem. What keeps everybody’s incentives aligned? Why does each of us trying selfishly to make a living result in a working fire fighting group (or whatever) instead of a tug-of-war? I understand the “invisible hand” when many different individuals are individually putting up goods/services for sale; I do not understand it as an explanation for how hundreds of people get coordinated into working institutions.
My 0-3 is an attempt to understand how something-like-selfishness (or something-like-altruism, or whatever) could stitch the people together into a thingy that could produce good stuff despite the principal agent problem / coordination difficulty.
At first glance, if we’re talking about a thing that requires cooperative effort from many people across time, this seems like a heck of a principal agent problem.
It turns out a whole lot of cooperation is achievable without explicit control. It’s not so much principal-agent, where a principal knows what they want and the agent has different goals. It’s more like agent-agent (or really, principal-principal), where all participants want compatible things, and small individual trades (I’ll let you keep 10% if you mill my grain) add up over time to fairly long chains of behaviors that build bridges and convenience stores and websites where we can discuss the puzzle of cooperation-without-coordination.
I’d argue that this is what “institution” means. A common understanding of what kinds of exchanges and behaviors will be rewarded. They’re bottom-up evolved human mutual expectations, not top-down designed structures. Though, of course, human intent can influence what kinds of culture are prevalent in any given subgroup.
I do not understand it as an explanation for how hundreds of people get coordinated into working institutions.
Something on my mind as I read this post is “evolution somehow creates pretty complicated things, with relatively low amounts of agency.”
There are clear limits on what evolution can build, especially in a given timeframe. I don’t have a clear model of how this relates back to your question, but “what sort of processes and feedback loops are involved when evolution invented multicellular organisms, etc” might be a useful pointer here.
At first glance, if we’re talking about a thing that requires cooperative effort from many people across time, this seems like a heck of a principal agent problem. What keeps everybody’s incentives aligned? Why does each of us trying selfishly to make a living result in a working fire fighting group (or whatever) instead of a tug-of-war? I understand the “invisible hand” when many different individuals are individually putting up goods/services for sale; I do not understand it as an explanation for how hundreds of people get coordinated into working institutions.
My 0-3 is an attempt to understand how something-like-selfishness (or something-like-altruism, or whatever) could stitch the people together into a thingy that could produce good stuff despite the principal agent problem / coordination difficulty.
It turns out a whole lot of cooperation is achievable without explicit control. It’s not so much principal-agent, where a principal knows what they want and the agent has different goals. It’s more like agent-agent (or really, principal-principal), where all participants want compatible things, and small individual trades (I’ll let you keep 10% if you mill my grain) add up over time to fairly long chains of behaviors that build bridges and convenience stores and websites where we can discuss the puzzle of cooperation-without-coordination.
I’d argue that this is what “institution” means. A common understanding of what kinds of exchanges and behaviors will be rewarded. They’re bottom-up evolved human mutual expectations, not top-down designed structures. Though, of course, human intent can influence what kinds of culture are prevalent in any given subgroup.
Something on my mind as I read this post is “evolution somehow creates pretty complicated things, with relatively low amounts of agency.”
There are clear limits on what evolution can build, especially in a given timeframe. I don’t have a clear model of how this relates back to your question, but “what sort of processes and feedback loops are involved when evolution invented multicellular organisms, etc” might be a useful pointer here.