Douglass North: Institutions Matter
Why are some countries rich and others poor despite similar resources? Douglass North's Nobel-winning answer: institutions—the rules of the game—shape economic behavior more than any other factor.
history-society
Trust Is Expensive to Build and Cheap to Destroy
Trust is an economic asset with a strange cost structure: it accumulates slowly through consistent, unremarkable behavior and collapses rapidly through a single visible betrayal. Understanding that asymmetry explains why institutions are so fragile, and why rebuilding them takes so long.
The Economics of Trust
Before money changes hands, trust does. The invisible institutions behind every transaction — contracts, norms, reputation systems — are the real infrastructure of economic life, and they're surprisingly fragile.
Synthesis: Engineering What Spreads
Not everything spreads the same way. A rumor travels differently than a habit, which travels differently than a political identity. Network science has mapped these distinct contagion mechanisms — and the findings change how you'd design anything meant to propagate.
R0 for Ideas: Viral Spread of Beliefs
Epidemiologists use R0 to predict whether a pathogen will burn out or explode through a population. Apply the same framework to ideas and beliefs, and a disturbing picture emerges: misinformation often has a higher R0 than truth, for structural reasons that have nothing to do with stupidity.
Network Topology: Small Worlds
Random networks and perfect lattices are both easy to analyze but rare in nature. Real social, biological, and technological networks cluster locally but stay globally connected — a structure with profound consequences for how quickly anything spreads through them.
Information Cascades: Herding Behavior
You're not irrational when you follow the crowd. You're doing Bayesian inference badly. Information cascades show how rational individuals produce collectively catastrophic beliefs.