The terrible guesses we make about how institutions work.
Placeholder. I am gathering examples of institutions that demonstrably do not work how we seem to assume, for now.
Incoming
This speaks to me: USDA Official Takes Courageous Stand Against Interstate Countercyclical Potato Pricing
Weirdly high implied QALY valuation of COVID interventions (Reddy 2020; Robinson, Sullivan, and Shogren 2021)
John Sterman’s Beer Gams
Aristotle’s physics, but for institutions
Newell and Wasson’s classic study of certain predictable failures of policy (Newell and Wasson 2002)
validating models by simulation (Sterman 2009)
validating models by experiment (Hubbard 2014)
Classic conspiracies are usually based on some Dunning-Kruger theorising.
References
Doyle, James K, Michael J Radzicki, and W Scott Trees. 1998. “Measuring Change in Mental Models of Dynamic Systems: An Exploratory Study.”
Garip, Filiz. 2020. “What Failure to Predict Life Outcomes Can Teach Us.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (15): 8234–35.
Heck, Patrick R., Christopher F. Chabris, Duncan J. Watts, and Michelle N. Meyer. 2020. “Objecting to Experiments Even While Approving of the Policies or Treatments They Compare.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (32): 18948–50.
Hubbard, Douglas W. 2014. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. 3 edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
Murphy, Ryan H. 2020. Markets Against Modernity: Ecological Irrationality, Public and Private. Capitalist Thought : Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Newell, Barry, and Robert Wasson. 2002. “Social System Vs Solar System: Why Policy Makers Need History.” In. Grenoble.
Reddy, Sanjay G. 2020. “Population Health, Economics and Ethics in the Age of COVID-19.” BMJ Global Health 5 (7): e003259.
Richards, Diana. 2001. “Coordination and Shared Mental Models.” American Journal of Political Science 45: 259–76.
Robinson, Lisa A., Ryan Sullivan, and Jason F. Shogren. 2021. “Do the Benefits of COVID-19 Policies Exceed the Costs? Exploring Uncertainties in the Age–VSL Relationship.” Risk Analysis 41 (5): 761–70.
Sommers, Samuel R., and Michael I. Norton. 2006. “Lay Theories About White Racists: What Constitutes Racism (and What Doesn’t).” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 9 (1): 117–38.
Sterman, John D. 2009. Business dynamics: systems thinking and modeling for a complex world. Nachdr. Boston: Irwin/McGraw-Hill.
Sterman, John D., and Gokhan Dogan. 2015. “‘I’m Not Hoarding, I’m Just Stocking up Before the Hoarders Get Here.’: Behavioral Causes of Phantom Ordering in Supply Chains.” Journal of Operations Management 39-40 (1): 6–22.
Sterman, John D., and Linda Booth Sweeney. 2007. “Understanding Public Complacency about Climate Change: Adults’ Mental Models of Climate Change Violate Conservation of Matter.” Climatic Change 80 (3-4): 213–38.
Uscinski, Joseph E., and Matthew Atkinson. 2013. “Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? The Role of Informational Cues and Predispositions.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2268782. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
Watts, Duncan J. 2011. Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. 1st ed. New York: Crown Business.
———. 2014. “Common Sense and Sociological Explanations.” American Journal of Sociology 120 (2): 313–51.
Zedelius, Claire M., Barbara C. N. Müller, and Jonathan W. Schooler. 2017. The Science of Lay Theories: How Beliefs Shape Our Cognition, Behavior, and Health. Springer.
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