Justin Wolfers gave an outstanding talk outlining the value of institutions in creating prosperity. See it here. I wish he was talking about America, and we have a rich history with some of the institutions he talks about–but we do not have a rich present in that regard.
American exceptionalism has always been a bit of an illusion. American has exceptional opportunity because of our geographic gifts. Through much of history, we’ve also had quite strong institutions. Especially since the 1970s, there’s been a movement in America to undermine the strength of those institutions, and that movement is now thrashing those institutions.
What is an institution? It’s important to note that what Wolfers and I mean by institution is not just a department or organization, but one that is founded in law or longstanding practice, and that it serves a public purpose. I know American institutions have been made out to be mysterious, conspiratorial, elite, or impersonal–but that last description–impersonal–is ironically the opposite of the effect that institutions have.
It’s hard to have personal dignity without safety, and many institutions, including the military, FEMA, and the Department of Justice, have helped to provide that safety. It’s hard to have personal dignity without basic knowledge and skills, and the Department of Education has helped level the educational playing field. It’s hard to have personal dignity without financial security, and the SEC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have helped provide a fair market for us to compete in.
I understand individuals can have awful experiences with these large bureaucracies. They are human organizations, and thus imperfect. But for most people most of the time, they build personal dignity, and that is not impersonal.
For an excellent book that runs parallel to Wolfer’s talk, check out Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.
Wolfer’s talk also runs parallel to Timothy Snyder’s discussions about institutions. Bear with me for a minute here.
These days when someone brings up the Holocaust, someone rolls their eyes and says “There we go again.” In the years after the Holocaust, people took it very, very seriously. They wanted to prevent that horror from happening again. So they scoured the available history to see what happened.
The problem was, the most available history to scour was only part of the story. The Cold War was quickly underway, so any history within the USSR was unavailable. What was available were German records, largely military records. And what people learned from that was the danger of institutions: institutions were painted as cold, inhuman, and dangerous.
This perspective was encapsulated in the Stanley Milgram electric shock studies. Milgram’s psychology study asked people to administer shocks to someone in the next room if they got an answer wrong. The study participants, directed by official-looking authority figures to give dangerously high shocks to the person in the next room–often did. (The people in the next room were fake–but the screams as people increased the level of shock sounded very real.)
The study was famous, and Milgram explicitly described his research as trying to understand the atrocities of WWII. Like the history found in German documentation, it told people that authoritative bureaucrats were the epitome of evil.
After the fall of the USSR, Timothy Snyder got into the history that was found beyond the Iron Curtain, where much Holocaust death actually occurred. Snyder, who knows numerous Eastern European languages, including Yiddish, built a different and I think compelling view of the cause of the Holocaust. You can take a perspective that German institutions caused the Holocaust. But an equal–perhaps more powerful–explanation is that the destruction of institutions caused the Holocaust.
A concentration camp is literally a place where the law does not apply–where state institutions have no authority. The countries where Jews fared the worst were not those that had the worst antisemitism before the war–they were the countries where the state was destroyed. Countries like Poland, where the government and all its institutions ceased to exist, and citizenship gave no one protection against violence. Jews who lived in Germany–as awful as it was–were much more likely to survive the war than those that lived in Poland, because it was difficult for the Germans to completely strip away the protections that citizenship bestowed upon German citizens–even Jews.
Listen to it in Snyder’s own words here.
This knowledge makes the radical conservatism Wolfer talks about seem both less radical and more essential. Our institutions are worth fighting for.
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