Building institutions for human flourishing

I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman and I explore this tantalising suggestion in Elinor Ostrom’s speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

     Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals
     to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts
     for much of the past half-century. Extensive empirical research leads me to
     argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the
     development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.  

We explore various ways in which the world we’ve built following the first strategy predicated on people’s self-interestedness has undermined the better angels of our nature. And we explore the institutions we might build to embrace the second strategy — to build the institutions of human flourishing.    

Without suggesting we can set the clock back, we look at what we’ve lost in amateur and community based sport as sport has become more professionalised and commercialised.  

We then discuss various ways in which people put boundaries around competition — for instance with rules against conflict of interest.

And we look at something I think is a big deal. I call them “de-competitive” institutions. These involve mechanisms of selection which are not competitive. This is particularly interesting where merit is selected without competition between the population from whom the most meritorious are selected.

We conclude with a quick look at something we'll explore later in greater depth. Hyper-competition produces ‘fast-foodification’ — a process whereby competitive strategies frustrate the  development of better habits of mind and body.

Though there are a few slides, you'll be able to easily follow along without looking at them. If you'd like to see them, they're here. The video can be seen here.