Probably worth reading, despite the endorsement from Ferguson.

"Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world—with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.
"In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army.
"Engagingly written, The Institutional Revolutiontraces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase, and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit, and wage labor—a shift which was crucial to the explosive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution."

Mostly economists?

State and Society in the Early Middle Ages

"The ideology of how economic activity is organized in capitalist economies is sharp and simple — markets. However, in reality, economic activities in capitalist economies are organized in a variety of different ways, market organization prominent among them but not totally dominating. The basic argument of this paper is that capitalist economies should be understood as mixed economies."

"challenges the conventional wisdom that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice... social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change... also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after familiar nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship... brought into their deliberations the trust, respect, and caring typical of those relationships. But it has also fostered values that run counter to democracy ... exclusivity ... aversion to rules ... have been the fault lines ... the fragility of the form less to its basic inefficiency or inequity than to the gaps between activists' democratic commitments and the cultural models on which they have depended ... The challenge ... is to forge new kinds of democratic relationships, ones that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness."

I really need to write up those notes on realism & social construction

"this book is about political culture. It examines developments in the social sciences and integrates them into a theoretical explanation of historical changes in political values. The starting point is the premise that political culture is rooted in the interaction between individual thinking and social norms. Through discourse, individual conceptions of social life are transformed and, interactively, social norms and cultural orientations as well. The first two parts of the book explore these issues theoretically. The second two examine them empirically by showing the ways that political cultures have changed over time. In the modern period the differences in the political cultures of capitalist and communist systems are contrasted; although both coneptualize social life in terms of property accumulation, they utilize different cultural orientations to reduce institutional transaction costs. The way the tensions between these two systems can be resolved is also explored."

"Most work for most people in the developed world is about coordinating their actions with those of others – colleagues, partners, underlings, bosses, customers, distributors, suppliers, publicists, regulators .... Information collection and transfer, while often important and sometimes essential to the co-ordination of actions, is not usually itself the main game." Consequently, we have not an "Information Society" but a "Joint-Action Society, although this does not quite capture all that is intended." Resonates oddly with the recent Cuff, Permuter and Cover paper on "coordination capacity".

Understatement of the week (at least): "If the preservation of its reputation for serving the interests of its clients was a major organizational goal for Goldman, then something clearly went terribly wrong."

"We investigate one of the world’s most pernicious forms of exploitation: child soldiering. Most theories can be captured by a principal-agent model that incorporates punishments, indoctrination, and age-varying productivity. For rebel leaders ... it is almost always optimal to coerce rather than reward children ... leaders will ... forcibly recruit children when punishment and supervision are cheap, when children’s outside options are poor, and when rebel leaders are resource-constrained. To see which mechanisms dominate in practice, we interview and survey former members of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, who provide a cruel natural experiment that reveals how children and adults respond to coercive incentives... children are more easily indoctrinated and disoriented than adults, but are less effective guerrillas; hence the optimal targets of coercion are young adolescents. We confirm predications of the model on a new “cross-rebel” dataset and suggest policy solutions."

A nice exposition of the highlights of _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_.

Nice, but not profound, interview with Ostrom.

...in which Coates, among much else, channels Mario Savio.

"draws on several centuries of political and social thought to show how globalization is best understood in terms of a power inherent in social relations, which he calls network power. Using this framework, he demonstrates how our standards of social coordination both gain in value the more they are used and undermine the viability of alternative forms of cooperation. A wide range of examples are discussed, from the spread of English and the gold standard to the success of Microsoft and the operation of the World Trade Organization, to illustrate how global standards arise and falter. The idea of network power supplies a coherent set of terms and conceptsapplicable to individuals, businesses, and countries alikethrough which we can describe the processes of globalization as both free and forced. The result is a sophisticated and novel account of how globalization, and politics, work." - Initial impression: Tom Slee did this better.

"all institutions are syncretic, ... composed of an indeterminate number of features, which are decomposable and recombinable in unpredictable ways. ... action within institutions is always potentially creative, ... draw[ing] on [many] cultural and institutional resources to create novel combinations. [This is] creative syncretism. ... existing accounts of institutional change, which are rooted in structuralism, produce excess complexity and render the most important sources and results of change invisible. ... we need [to explain] how people live institutional rules. We find that grounding in John Dewey’s pragmatist theory of habit. ... a field guide to creative syncretism. It uses an experiential approach to provide novel insights on three problems that have occupied institutionalist research: periodization in American political development, convergence among advanced capitalist democracies, and institutional change in developing countries."

Henry Farrell appreciation of Elinor Ostrom.

" Arguing that "the Great Plains environment. . .constitutes a geographic unity whose influences have been so powerful as to put a characteristic mark upon everything that survives within its borders," Webb singles out the revolver, barbed wire, and the windmill as evidence of the new phase of civilization required for settlement of that arid, treeless region. Webb draws on history, anthropology, geography, demographics, climatology, and economics to substantiate his thesis that the 98th meridian constituted an institutional fault—comparable to a geological fault—at which "practically every institution that was carried across it was either broken and remade or else greatly altered.""

Institutionalizing BMI, despite its ineffectiveness and the existence of superior alternatives. (Which, errr, make it even more obvious that I'm way over-weight, so this isn't rationalization on my part.) Lots of issues here for a data-mining class.

"The joint dynamics of population-level social institutions and individual preferences (or more broadly cultures) are illustrated in four case studies: the end of Communist Party rule in the German Democratic Republic, the transformation of traditional contracts governing agricultural work in the Philippines, the demise of Apartheid in South Africa, and the spread and retreat of female genital cutting in West Africa. A stochastic evolutionary game model of the underlying processes captures five interrelated aspects of real world historical dynamics: its often bottom- up and decentralized nature, the complementarity between cultural and institutional dynamics, the long term persistence of inefficient institutions, the often revolutionary nature of institutional and cultural change and the prominent role of technical change in the process of institutional and cultural innovation." --- Do I detect, comrades, in that last sentence, an echo of "in the last instance"?

Published version, via JSTOR. (The discussants seem clueless.)

Inequality has risen in America because of political and institutional shifts. (Can you say "class struggle"? I knew you could.) Attempts to pretend that it is due to exogenous economic forces (patterns of trade, returns on education a.k.a. "skill-biased technological change") are at best underinformed, and in the case of people who should know better, such as economists, more likely disingenuous.

Stiglitz's Nobel Prize lecture, 2001. VERY good, even allowing for the somewhat Stiglitz-centric tone (and the surprising number of typos; you'd think the Bank of Sweden could afford some copy-editors).

Joe Stiglitz on the systemic causes of the current crisis. "We are in the midst of micro-economic failure on a grand scale."

Memo to self: see if library has copy of Heller.

Review: http://bactra.org/reviews/ober-democracy-and-knowledge.html

Ch. 1 (free; follow link) is good enough that I'll probably read the rest.

A teaser for the book _Remnants of War_, arguing that most major violent conflict is now the work of "surprisingly small" bands of thugs, and amendable to policing.

It looks like a lot of people have been following the Young/Foster "how to be a hedge fund wizard" strategy with credit default swaps, and it's all coming undone. Note: horrible institutional set-up.

Excellent piece on credit derivatives and the underlying institutional/cognitive problems of the markets, financial modeling, etc. Makes me extra glad I didn't agree to supervise the credit default swap thesis.

Aaronsw on Elster's latest book, an unread copy of which glares at me from the shelf as I type.

*radiates intense guilt over his eating habits*

I don't know most of this crew, but Bobbi Low & Carl Simon are good people... In our library.

Fish, barrel, smoking gun...

"we no longer need books telling us that the Internet is a big thing. It is time to treat that fact, as Shirky sometimes does, as the starting point for a discussion rather than the conclusion. The questions then become ones of what kind of structures wil

Young Ezra defends the idea of crafting institutions to cope with people's everyday irrationalities, against a very strange (if not plain stupid) objection.

Nov. 2007 lecture

One of those wonderful little books which shape how you think about everything.

V. good book on the history of modern finance & financial modeling. Micro-review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2007-10.html

Surprisingly sane; notes at http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2006-05.html

Loud and prolonged applause.

Risk vs. uncertainty again; 1994;might have some interesting thoughts about modeling decision-making under actual uncertainty. Later: stupid mistakes about ergodicity (which is actually NOT relevant to the argument he wants to make). No actual models/theories Smart but vague insights about conventions and institutions as devices for managing uncertainty.

empirically, "groups from which exit is more costly (professional associations and unions) are structured more democratically than those in which members face fewer barriers to exit (citizen associations)"

Cf. my "modest proposal for the reform of corporate governance" from a few years ago