Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

Danny,

IMO (selfishly on my part ) one of your best papers – success and failure of institutions being near and dear to my heart.

RE: https://www.academia.edu/38466999/Are_Institutions_Created_by_Collective_Acceptance?

CONTEXT QUESTION

0. Could be a little more ‘bold’ in the abstract, because the question you are trying to answer is relevant to the urgent present condition – abstract under rates the argument? My understanding is that you consistently address the arguments of other authors in proper academic fashion, but do you tie your work back to general theory, or general arguments? Or do you intend your audience to interpret each paper in a vacuum rather than as a collection of your works in defense or advocacy of a theory?

ANSWERED QUESTION

1. Attributing greater agency to people than they have? (not sure if this is answered)

2. Do institutions(producers) rules (products) and actions (services) fulfill a market demand or fail to fulfill a market demand? (answered)

3. Is the failure to fulfill a market demand due to (a) contrary to demand, (b) limiting demand, (c) assisting demand? (answered)

UNANSWERED QUESTION

5. Do you mean to say that status is assigned or that institutions can provide a vehicle for signaling by virtue of either the coercive power delivered to their members or success at competing within the limits of those coercive powers?

6. Is the market demand determined by Moral Intuitions (group strategies), Ethical Intuitions (Organizational Strategies), or Generational, or Gender intuitions (strategies)?

7. Are the Neocon, Marxist, Libertarian, Postmodern, Feminist movements made possible by temporary economic windfalls from hydrocarbons, the industrial and technological revolutions lasting only until asymmetry of underclasses and technology is ameliorated by regression to the mean? And is that the underlying conflict?

8. Are we not only discovering that this luxury makes females and males diverge in demonstration of genetic interests (rather than converge as the left anticipated), but that groups within empires and nation states are seeking expression of genetic interests generating unresolvable conflict of interest?

9. What equilibrium must be established to move in any given direction from existing intellectual, narrative, economic, political, social, and familial orders?

10. Is there any value of scale, or (as in the ancient world) do we regress to the mean and decline slowly in order to preserve what we perceive as benefits of institutional and political scale?

thanks.