This lecture is based on a soon-to-appear book of stories about
institutions and how they sometimes fail to perform in ways
we expect. Institutions have figured prominently in theories of
politics of the last half-century. The classic statement of what
came to be known as the new institutionalism was articulated
by the late Nobel Laureates Douglass North and Elinor Ostrom,
summarizing the realization that institutions structure and
constrain rational action. As the economic historian Joel
Mokyr observed, “Institutions are in a way much like prices in a
competitive market: individuals can respond to them differently,
but they must take them parametrically and cannot change
them.” They channel the choices of individual actors.
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