🤖 AI Summary
In growth-oriented societies, dominant technologies, while enhancing productivity, may erode the social practices necessary for recognizing failure, thereby heightening the risk of predatory institutional arrangements. This study proposes a “defensive pessimism” analytical framework that integrates dynamic systems modeling, resilience analysis, and institutional evolution theory, conceptualizing culture as a stock of cognitive capital. The framework reveals how economic growth can expand the population of skeptics while simultaneously diminishing their political influence. The research identifies critical thresholds between practice erosion and institutional collapse, demonstrating that preserving external practices nearly guarantees the activation of corrective mechanisms. Furthermore, it introduces a “rolling performance bond” mechanism designed to safeguard high-value reform alternatives against opportunistic dismantling of experimental initiatives, thereby supporting robust institutional adaptation.
📝 Abstract
Successful cooperation can destroy the practice needed to recognize its own failure. I study a growing society in which a common technology raises output and the hazard of an appropriative regime, while a culturally sustained outside practice supplies the counterfactual and operating capacity needed for correction. The key object is cumulative practice erosion measured in breakdown-hazard time. If erosion is less scale-sensitive than breakdown, expected correction is finite; if it is more sensitive, the mean delay is infinite; and equal elasticities produce an exact coefficient boundary. Correction nevertheless remains almost surely eventual unless politics eliminates the outside practice.
The same mechanism creates a mass--share wedge: growth can increase skeptical mass and diagnostic evidence while the skeptics' political share vanishes. Every fixed nonunanimous population threshold is then crossed in finite time. Culture is a stock of epistemic capital rather than an irreplaceable ideology. A fully funded pilot that maintains the complete outside practice can replicate it, but creates a capitalized enforcement and rebuilding liability. Under external commitment, a rolling performance bond forfeited upon cancellation funds that liability, blocking opportunistic repeal while permitting reforms valuable enough to replace the lost experiment.