12 Comments
founding
Nov 30, 2021Liked by Arnold Kling

In Los Angeles, private schools have been no refuge for parents or students. My son attended a private school and we have friends whose children attended various others; together, these families attend the "best" private schools in Los Angeles, and they all closed down for over a year of remote learning. They have all re-opened this year, but all of them continue to enforce all day masking with few exceptions. Additionally, they have all embraced Critical Race Pedagogy. Our school has Zoom lectures from both Kendi & D'Angelo & Kendi has been re-invited despite poor attendance at his last appearance. They have created & continue to promote racially segregated monthly affinity group virtual meetings, again, poorly attended by all reports.

Seventeen of my son's class of 68 chose not to return this year (including us). Some left the state, a few of us are home schooling. But private education, at least in this deep Blue city, is not the answer.

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Where I work, one kind of failure is an entrenched 'tragedy of the commons'.

To put it very generally to protect the innocent (i.e., me), many key executives and staff face a common, individual choice between a hard right and an easy wrong.

The hard right is slow, cumbersome, annoying, makes one reliant on third parties and multiple layers of middlemen, and requires tremendous reserves of patience while waiting in 'receive mode' for other people to do their jobs. It is overly inflexible because there is no good way to 'appeal' for some kind of exception justified by what one wants to argue is an exigent circumstance, because of the cry-wolf problem, in which everybody says their pet project is exigent. The hard right way, however, is the only way one even gets close to preventing a total collapse into disorganized chaos.

The easy wrong is just going around all that, doing things by oneself, "asking forgiveness instead of permission", cutting out all the middlemen, and dealing directly and privately with someone hierarchically-distant. This is super efficient if one person does it one time. If everybody does it all the time, everything breaks down and productivity collapses as people duplicate effort and work at cross purposes and generally fail to stay on the same sheet of music.

So, the incentive for individuals is always to want everyone else to follow the norm, but to have the option to violate the norm on their own initiative when it's their own project.

What happens is that an institution may start with everyone following the norm, but gradually people make exceptions for themselves, other people see that happen, start to do it too, and eventually you have a culture of circumvention and general disrespect of 'official' norms in general, as being something only naive chumps would follow voluntarily, or low status workers without autonomy would be compelled to follow involuntarily. "Taxes are for the little people."

Once established it is extremely hard to reverse. For one thing, a lot of this operates on the honor system, and few have the stomach to use monitoring and surveillance tools to detect violations and then to hold people accountable for them using consequences of whatever severity are necessary to deal with the problem. High status executives and staff would revolt over such a perceived hit to their autonomy.

Enforcement of anything in general takes personalities with real authority and top cover and who are not at all averse to direct personal confrontation, which is alien to the culture at the executive level in many institutions. Also, top staff know where the bodies are buried, and ruffling feathers too much in the corporate soap opera is a good recipe for them leaving, leaking, or otherwise undermining leaders and the mission.

Leaders at the elite level want maximum flexibility for themselves, and so want to be able to make exactly this kind of exception. They want to be able to talk and direct people with secrecy, and not worry about what happens to people who needed to know but now don't. They don't want to be accused of hypocrisy, or being biased or unfair, "you made an exception for her, but not for him?". It is too difficult if not impossible to articulate any clear and well-defined 'law' about the matter. Sometimes top leaders *want* certain subordinates to do whatever it takes - i.e., violate the official norms - to expedite and shake something loose, but don't want *other* subordinates to know that leaders can and do authorize exceptions to norms advertised as "always and for everyone", or that the fallout they have to deal with was a consequence of that leader's decision.

Once this kind of rot has set in, there is really nothing else one can do but a hard reset which like with software often means starting over from scratch in many areas with a completely new set of people and rules, which at least buys you some time before organizational weeds and social entropy accumulate and need to be cut back and reset again. It’s like regular maintenance, and if institutions keep deferring it, they eventually break catastrophically.

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I think there is an implicit assumption that skews our thinking on the subject: Institutions can be, and ought to be, immortal.* That is, if we only set things up right and do the proper maintenance, our institutions ought to run just fine forever. I think we ought to seriously think about the possibility that this is not true, that institutions are just like every other complex adaptive system of autonomous parts, and eventually become rotten and dysfunctional enough to die and be replaced by a better version.

It is possible that smaller institutions can avoid this problem longer, or that larger institutions are more prone to rot and dysfunction due to exceeding the limits of line of sight management. (I expect both are true.) But there does not seem to a good a priori reason to believe that institutions collapsing is a sign of something going wrong that we could fix so much as just the end of their life cycle. The old saw "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program" is quite damning in that sense; we can't even let temporary institutions end, much less those meant to be more permanent.

*Institutions in the "organization of people" sense, not necessarily in the really broad sense including culture, etc.

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"Are college students so susceptible to radical teaching?"

Show me any appreciable number who are not.

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"Sarbanes-Oxley. Does that legislation solve the problem?"

No, unless you get a DoJ which actually tries to enforce SarBox consistently (instead of cherry-picking targets for enforcement).

Good luck getting the current DoJ brass to stop such cherry-picking.

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This is an aside, but I wish someone like you would write the definitive history of the S&L crisis, FSLIC, etc. In many ways it set the pattern for the new economy—HERA was even copied from FIRREA—but few talk about it.

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