We are told endlessly in the UK that "institutions are strong". This is about as foolishly optimistic a statement as I can recall hearing, from ostensibly serious people. Institutions are not strong. Institutions are made of people. People are weak, corrupt, lazy, stupid, and endlessly self-serving. Institutions are weak.

> People are weak, corrupt, lazy, stupid, and endlessly self-serving. Institutions are weak

This is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low-trust societies are filled with weak, corrupted, lazy and stupid leaders.

The problem with MBA’s is that they don’t value what decent men and women bring to the table.

I’d rather pay double for an honest mechanic. Asymmetric information requires a ton of resources to protect against, or you can just know the person you’re dealing with is honest.

The problem with MBAs is that they rightfully recognize that most people can’t identify if a mechanic is honest or not, so they make recommendations that assume nobody is 100% honest — which is true, but elides all of the value of hiring honest people.

The dishonest mechanic is incentivized to make you think they are honest. The honest mechanic appears honest. Knights and knaves problem.

The problem with government institutions in the USA isn’t MBAs. It’s that sources of corruption / bias were identified and counteracted with rules. And rules. And rules. And rules. And many of those rules appear to counter the common sense of the average person. So the average person believes the institutions don’t hold value. That and politics meant that lots of the laws that govern those institutions assume that no citizen is an honest mechanic and they all need to constantly prove to Vogons that they aren’t dishonest.

A great dive into the last park was done by Jen Pahlka in _Recoding America_.

One of the mechanisms that provides for strong institutions is filtering who is accepted and promoted within it.

The systems and concepts, like the Nolan Principles, are nothing more than words -- but if the majority agree to them, then the minority who violate them should be prevented from growing their influence.

In the US, it seems that despite having strong public institutions, the leadership of the country has reached a tipping point where those institutions are no longer valued.

Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.

Are strong institutions the result of a strong people, or do strong institutions make a strong people? Which one should you start with?