I think you are being too literal. I interpreted Eliezer as saying that the obstacles to good large institutions are so great, that most of them never get off the ground. The rest of the post mentions some of the explanations for and implications of this fact. (Completely rewritten comment to be more polite and helpful)

How many is 'many'? And are countries now "institutions"? I agree that 'Germany' survives, but not that, say, the Second Reich / Third Reich / GDR survive.

How many governments in Africa maintain continuity back to 1913? Asia? (Hm, maybe India - whups, no, independence and the partition; China - but the government fell to warlords and Communists; perhaps wealthy industrializing Japan - no, conquered by America; Vietnam or Korea - actually maybe we'd better go somewhere else.) How many governments in South America? (No, that's not too good either given how many coups and revolutions there always are there.) Well, there's always Europe (wait, no, WWI, WWII, the Iron Curtain, and the fall of the Warsaw Pact, all took out a ton of governments).

Well. There's always North America. Three governments counts as 'many countries', doesn't it?

(But wasn't there some sort of unpleasantness in Mexico 1910-1920... I'd better be quiet about that so as to not spoil a beautiful theory.)

My interpretation is that most of the things we desperately need large institutions to do are simply not being done.