It’s sometimes easy to forget that institutions often arise as solutions to problems.
For example:
• Journalism uncovers and spreads information that matters to people that would otherwise be hard for them to know.
• Education teaches people what they’ll need to know that they won’t easily learn on their own.
• Science increases our understanding of (and control over) reality.
• Civil Courts right wrongs between people.
• Finance (among other things) enables money to move between those with excesses of it (looking to profit) and those with good uses for it.
In the case of persistent needs, when institutions do less of what they were designed to do (especially when they pretend they’re still doing it), it creates societal dysfunction. An important role is no longer fulfilled, while many people may believe that it is still being done, and that niche is already filled – so it’s hard for anything else to fulfill this missing role.
The reality is that some societal institutions have stopped doing what they claim as much as they used to.
Usually this is not because someone has swapped the institution for something else, but because of a combination of:
• Zombie-behavior: continuation of the same *activities* even though they no longer make sense or achieve the goals they once did, for instance due to failing to adapt to a changing world
•Self-perpetuation: doing what allows the institution to expand (or even just survive), even though this comes at the expense of carrying out its purpose
• Gaming: doing the easy thing that looks like the right behaviors instead of the actually valuable behaviors
• Capture: doing what’s good for those that now officially or unofficially control or heavily influence the institution, instead of what’s good for society
Of course, not all institutions are dysfunctional; some still serve their purposes. But there has been substantial fraying.
A great future for humanity will require either finding better ways to repair vital institutions that have declined, or replacing them with something even better at fulfilling their roles.
This piece was first written on July 24, 2026 and first appeared on my website on September 14, 2026.
Great!
The institution that we need to replace, having lost it too, is about how our social business system of macroeconomics works (after discovering of what it consists). This has as history where it was badly treated as a pseudo-science that was based on intuition and biased claims. Instead it should be based on logic after it has its terms properly defined and its necessary assumptions clearly stated and confirmed.
We need this new science in order that governments are provided with better ways for investigating the effects of making policy changes by simulation of the whole social business system to find the subsequent results.
This has already been tried, but in every case there have been limitations due to not being able to properly represent the whole of any national economy. So the results are biased to support specific political needs. They are not sufficiently general to cover all of the situation and balance the general needs of the whole population. In connection with the deliberate establishment of non-availability of useful sites of land, it can be shown that this results in social inequalities and greater poverty.