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Transaction Costs: Why Firms Exist

Transaction Costs: Why Firms Exist

If markets are so efficient, why do firms exist at all? This was the question Ronald Coase asked in 1937, and Oliver Williamson spent his career answering. Williamson won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for work that seems almost tautological once you understand it: firms exist to reduce

Douglass North: Institutions Matter

Douglass North: Institutions Matter

In 1993, Douglass North won the Nobel Prize in Economics for a simple but revolutionary insight: the rules of the game determine economic outcomes more than resources, geography, or technology. North spent his career asking a question economists had mostly ignored: why do some societies develop while others don'

Social Capital: Bowling Alone

Social Capital: Bowling Alone

In 1995, political scientist Robert Putnam published an article with a striking claim: Americans were "bowling alone." Bowling league participation had collapsed. But so had participation in nearly every form of civic association—the PTA, churches, unions, service clubs, professional organizations, political parties. The social infrastructure that Tocqueville

Repeated Games: Why Cooperation Emerges

Repeated Games: Why Cooperation Emerges

In 1984, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a tournament that changed how we understand cooperation. He invited experts in game theory, economics, and computer science to submit strategies for an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Each strategy would play against every other strategy, round after round. The winner would be

You're Being Engineered: Here's How to Notice

You're Being Engineered: Here's How to Notice

In 2016, Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 87 million Facebook users without their consent. Using psychological profiling based on personality traits, they crafted targeted political advertising designed to manipulate voting behavior. The scandal broke in 2018. Outrage followed. Cambridge Analytica went bankrupt. Facebook paid billions in fines. But here'

Propaganda and Persuasion Science

Propaganda and Persuasion Science

You're being engineered. Not occasionally. Not maybe. Every day, across every platform, through every medium, someone is trying to shape your beliefs, behaviors, and desires using techniques developed over a century of scientific research into human influence. This isn't conspiracy thinking. It's the explicit

Synthesis: Building Trust at Scale

Synthesis: Building Trust at Scale

This series has traced a consistent theme: trust is the invisible infrastructure that makes complex societies possible. Douglass North showed that institutions—the rules of the game—determine economic outcomes. Oliver Williamson showed that firms exist to reduce transaction costs, which are really trust costs. Elinor Ostrom showed that communities