The best institutional analysis produces arguments that become more rather than less relevant as time passes. Some of this blog's arguments have done that.
The Durable Arguments
The arguments that have aged best are the ones that identified structural conditions that have become more rather than less relevant as the period of analysis has extended. The argument that the accountability gap is the primary structural source of institutional failure has aged well — the period of five years has produced enough institutional failures, in enough different domains, with enough consistent accountability gaps at their centre, that the argument is more rather than less supported by the accumulated evidence. The argument that the coordination layer's control over economic value creation would become the central governance challenge of the digital economy has aged well — the regulatory responses to platform power that have developed across multiple jurisdictions have confirmed the analysis of the coordination economy's structural dynamics. And the argument that institutional design reflects the interests of those who shaped the institution more than the interests of those it is supposed to serve has aged better than any other argument in the blog, because it has been confirmed in domain after domain across five years of analysis.
The arguments that have aged best are also the arguments whose underlying structural conditions are most stable — conditions that do not change rapidly because they are embedded in institutional architecture that resists rapid change. The coordination economy's structural laws, the accountability gap's persistence, and the distributional logic of institutional failure are structural features of the current institutional landscape that will remain relevant long after the specific events that confirmed them have been superseded by subsequent events.
The arguments that age well are the ones built on stable structural conditions rather than on the specific events that revealed them. The event is temporary; the structural condition that produced it is the analytical content. The framework that describes the structural condition will outlast the events that demonstrated it.
Discussion