The Institutions that Cannot Keep Up

When big problems arrive, the usual response of a modern country is to build an institution. A new agency. A new body. A new regulator. This has worked, historically. It is how most of the last century's problems were addressed.

It is not working as well now. The new institutions, when built, are slow. They are staffed by people who were formed in the institutions they were meant to fix. They are captured by the interests they were meant to regulate. They run out of energy within a few years. The people who tried hardest inside them leave, exhausted.

This may be temporary. Institutions have always been slower than events.

Or it may not be temporary. It may be that the kind of institution we built for the last century — large, formal, professional, hierarchical — is no longer fit for the problems our century is producing. If so, the usual response to pressure will not work. Something else will have to be built.

We do not yet know what. Smaller things. Faster things. More local. More voluntary. Some are already being tried, in quiet places, by people who know the old institutions are not going to save them.

Whether these grow into something that can hold what the century is going to throw at us is an open question. A few will. Most will not. The ones that do will probably not look like what any of us currently expect.

This morning, the man in front of me at the bakery paid for his bread and then, without looking at me, paid for mine as well. I tried to thank him. He said it was not worth thanking him for. He said someone had done the same for him a month ago, and he had been looking for his turn. He left before I could ask him his name. The woman behind the counter gave me my change and said he did this most weeks. She did not say it as though it was a remarkable thing. She said it the way you say the weather.