Subscribe:
RSS feed
Promoting discussion and collaboration in social and cultural evolution
Browsing All posts tagged under »institutions«
Why Become a Farmer?
The previous blog discussed Göbekli Tepe, which achieved a surprisingly high level of social complexity before the adoption of agriculture. In the language of philosophy of science, Göbekli Tepe is an anomaly for the reigning paradigm in theoretical archaeology, which posits that the adoption of agriculture was the pre-condition for, or even the cause of, […]
Living without a State
November 29, 2012 by Peter Turchin
We came through relatively unscathed by Sandy – only three days without power. Others had to wait longer, but eventually all affected towns had power restored and roads cleared up. Normal life has resumed. It happened sort-of on its own, except in reality it didn’t. It actually happened because there was a relatively efficient state […]
Twilight of the Elites. Or the Unintended Consequences of Meritocracy
August 29, 2012 by Peter Turchin
I just finished reading a very interesting, and quite alarming, book by Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites. As best as I can tell, Hayes doesn’t know about cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) theory, yet his book is a perfect illustration of one of the general principles directly stemming from a central theoretical result in CMLS, […]
Matthew Zimmerman: Groups as the Most Natural and Useful Level of Analysis (a comment on Pinker)
July 6, 2012 by SEF Editor
In my view, debates concerning whether kin selection, individual selection, group selection or multilevel selection are ‘true’ are ill-conceived. These are merely different frameworks for thinking about evolutionary change. Since any two of these frameworks, independently brought to bear on the same question, can result in similar answers, it is perhaps more productive to ask […]
Catherine M. Tucker: Comments on Ostrom
April 11, 2012 by SEF Editor
Ostrom’s article presents a cogently argued and lucid approach to investigating the evolution of institutions in complex social-ecological systems. It combines a commitment to testable questions, rigorous data collection, attention to existing data and theories, and synthetic integration and analysis of data. It is sufficiently flexible to allow for novel interpretations and emergence of new […]
Jenna Bednar: Three Questions for the Institutional Dynamics Agenda Related to Inter-Rule Relationships
April 11, 2012 by SEF Editor
To the thoughtful foundational essays written by Wilson & Gowdy and Elinor Ostrom, I suggest three questions. Because it is often helpful to have a concrete application in mind, I’ll phrase this commentary in terms of constitutional dynamics. Constitutions are particularly interesting for our study: they are sets of related rules, each clause formally independent, […]
Steven C. Hayes. Variation and Selection in Rules and Rule-Governance: The Perspective of Behavioral Psychotherapy
April 6, 2012 by SEF Editor
The Latin root of “rules” (regula) originally just meant a straight stick, and later a stick used for measuring. That sense remains in English (e.g., a wooden ruler), but a later sense was simply that of any consistent pattern (e.g., ruled paper, or “I don’t eat before noon, as a rule”). The most recent sense […]
David D. Laitin: On Ostrom (or “Linphoria before Jeremy”)
April 6, 2012 by SEF Editor
Professor Ostrom has put her neophyte reader in a difficult situation. Hers is a mature research program of enormous scope and intellectual yield. However, because of that, it is far too complex to be neatly summarized in an introductory section, and if fully summarized, there would be no further space for a positive contribution to […]
Yasha Hartberg: Commentary on Elinor Ostrom
April 5, 2012 by SEF Editor
I find myself once again grateful for Ostrom’s foundational work. The systematic study of institutional change is a daunting subject with potentially countless variables, yet Ostrom and her colleagues at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis have managed to propose a framework which deftly gives this bewildering complexity empirical traction. As Ian Lustick […]
Ian Lustick: Commentary on Wilson and Gowdy
April 4, 2012 by SEF Editor
Having exceeded the allotted 500 words in my comment on Elinor Ostrom’s paper, I do not want to presume to heavily on the attention of colleagues by writing a long comment on this important paper. I am essentially in full agreement with the argument, that evolutionary thinking holds immense promise for improving the social sciences. […]
Marco Janssen: Information as a Guiding Principle of the Evolution of Institutions
April 4, 2012 by SEF Editor
The fit between ecological dynamics and institutional arrangements is at the forefront of the study of the governance of social-ecological systems. How do resource users create new institutional arrangements? Does that relate to the knowledge of the ecological dynamics? When Ostrom and myself started to develop agent-based models of rule evolution, we came to the […]
Greg Urban: On Rules, Ultimate Causes, and Cultural Motion
April 3, 2012 by SEF Editor
In my admittedly small corner of anthropology, I study the motion of culture, taking “culture” to be what we acquire through social transmission and social learning. I am particularly concerned with how motion takes place — transmission through the medium of artifacts, especially ephemeral ones like sounds and behaviors, but also more durable ones such […]
Commentary: Ian S. Lustick on Elinor Ostrom
April 1, 2012 by SEF Editor
Elinor Ostrom’s paper makes it clear that the set of observed institutions is but a tiny fraction of the total possible permutations of values on the seven institutional dimensions she identifies. This implies that in order to account for the origins of institutions of a particular type, an argument must be made about the trajectories […]
Elinor Ostrom. Enhancing the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
March 26, 2012 by SEF Editor
In discussions with farmers who have built and managed irrigation systems, one hears about how hard it is to find the right combination of rules that work in a particular setting. They have had to try out multiple combinations of rules and keep making small adjustments to get the system working well and ensure that […]
May 20, 2013 by Peter Turchin
9