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Comments (28)
Incentives explain a lot. Add to that incomplete information and intellectual and emotional biases. There are reasons that large organizations are often such hell holes.
Another help is evolutionary theory. If an organization actually solves a problem, it will cease to exist. But if it makes the problem worse, it will be eternal and grow without bounds.
I think your evolutionary theory explanation is a bit underspecified.
Since organizations don't have offspring, classical natural selection can't be occurring. It's conceivable that even if organizations have the tendency to go bad as you describe, new uncorrupted organizations may be created and old organizations may be dissolved at such rates that the vast majority of extant organizations are effectively solving the problems they set out to solve. Or the steady state may be bleaker as you suggest.
Natural selection can occur without offspring. Natural selection is just having differential kill rates for differing features.
Yes. Conceivable. The major counter forces are the ability of the first organization to crowd out newcomers by starving them for resources, or infect newcomers with their corruption.
Only if it makes the problem worse in a way that is not obvious to those who care about solving it. If the American Lung Association went around giving out cigarettes, people might eventually catch on.
Not necessarily if it simultaneously produced research saying that cigarettes are good for your lungs.
Nah. Eventually some folks would decide enter the lung-doctoring profession because their parents had died of lung cancer and they actually wanted to cure it. People are not predictably 100% short-sighted and mercenary; the Prisoner's Dilemma is not the "Prisoner's Stupid Question – Obviously Everyone Defects All The Time."
Well, medicine was dominated by crackpots and charlatans for millennia and no one seems to have noticed until recently. For example, Mercury was used as a cure for all sorts of things for quite a long time. Not to mention how long bloodletting was used in medicine. I could give more examples but you get the idea.