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Comment by d_burfoot | Hacker News Reader

> Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed.

I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just don't experience that much competitive pressure, and that's why there are so many zombie institutions, whose activities resemble a kind of mindless shambling rather than any kind of rational constructive motion.

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I foundationally disagree with your premise

If you look at the composition and charters of these old “institutions” like governments, universities etc… the scope and function, the amount of resources put towards them etc… is very much not static.

In fact, they are exceptionally different than they were at their founding, and this is specifically true for universities with how they were funded at the beginning versus how they are funded now as well as what their role in the social organization of society is

So this concept that there are these big monolithic things - by function of simply not changing names - haven’t changed, is silly at best

The Crimson even did a huge writeup of this:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/5/22/yir-college-adm...

Bottom line, all of these institutions have been captured by moneyed interests and that’s the cycle

Public goods get privatized by dominating financiers and used to benefit the in group they serve while passing all externalities to the out group

Aka “capitalism” - and yes, this applies to the Soviet Union perfectly because the Bolshevik coopted all of the land in Soviet territories on behalf of the bosheviks and had nothing to do with individual labor power - so please save your communist complaints for somebody who is promoting communism because that’s not me

My brother is an executive at a small private college, where he graduated from and has worked most of his adult life, and in the last two decades it’s leadership, overarching vision and identity, and strategies for securing enrollments have gone through a few fairly major shifts in response to changing economic, political, and social pressures. It has had to be exceptionally agile and adaptable to keep itself relevant and competitive. I think the parent post has a point with regards to the risks of a sclerotic bureaucracy, but the level of no-effort confidence in one’s own survival I think is vanishingly rare in all but the most entrenched institutions.

Can you give examples of zombie institutions?

He did: > Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years

so: Harvard, FDA, Google, American Postal Workers Union, State Farm. Also banks, I would say.

> Also banks, I would say

Banks get “torn apart and cannibalized” more frequently than industrials.

That often doesn't seem to be a result of competitive pressure, but of hubris. I think in many of those cases, in the framework set out by the article, the sociopaths would still be in charge of the company.

> often doesn't seem to be a result of competitive pressure, but of hubris

Column A / Column B. If hubris is the root, the less hubristic competitor takes it over on failure. If competition causes excessive risk taking, the better-managed bank wins. The system really only loses when competitive pressure causes everyone to lower their guard, which happens, which is why banking has to be tightly regulated. (And this is true with or without fractional reserves.)

Well, big banks. Like Wells Fargo, still limping along. And maybe Boeing is in the "complacent industry" category, also recently in the news.

Boeing? Id look at old school defense and enterprise b2b corps. In a lot of cases they sell out of date products and if they somehow lost all blueprints / source code they probably wouldn’t be able to even reproduce it because no one there even knows how it works

From the outside organisations appear functional and like they mostly have it together. When you are sitting inside, practically every organisation and particularly those at scale, feels like a zombie.

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