What I’ve been reading
The principle behind a rule, the cost that shows a reform, and the scorekeeper that can quietly undo it.
This week’s two posts asked the same question from opposite ends: what makes a change to a country’s rules actually last? Why Political Reform Is Difficult to Sustain worked it out in general; Whatever Trump Builds, the Next President Inherits ran the same test over a live example. The focus was on how a reform is made to stick, and why so many changes that look like clean wins quietly come apart.
WHAT HOLDS A RULE IN PLACE
One idea runs under both posts, borrowed from economics: a country’s rules hold not because they are written down but because everyone expects everyone else to keep to them. Change a rule, and nothing moves until the new expectation becomes common knowledge. Not just believed, but believed to be believed.
How Common Knowledge Builds and Weakens Societies Steven Pinker, interviewed by Yascha Mounk
The jump from “everyone knows” to “everyone knows that everyone knows” is what lets a crowd act as one. It is why the child who says the emperor has no clothes changes everything, while a thousand private doubts change nothing. Pinker draws the darker version too: an autocrat who controls who may gather and who may speak is not really censoring opinions; he is stopping them from becoming common knowledge.
The power of leadership in changing social norms in heterogeneous societies Fabio Galeotti, Jona Krutaj and Marie Claire Villeval
When private preferences shift only slowly, a minority cannot dislodge an entrenched norm on its own: everyone sits still, waiting for everyone else. Add a leader who publicly commits to the better rule, and expectations snap onto it. It is the crystallising move. Not new information, not a change of heart, just a single visible act that lets each person see the others have seen it too.
Institutions, Technology and Prosperity Daron Acemoglu
In his Nobel lecture, Acemoglu ties why some countries prosper to who actually holds power, and to the gap between power on paper and power in fact. That gap is the wall: the limit nobody can measure until someone leans on it.
PAYING FOR A REFORM, AND MAKING IT HOLD
First, a reform has to be paid for, and the payment that proves a government means it is the cost that lands on its own side, not only on its enemies. Then it has to be made to hold, because entrenchment is cheaper than transformation and a win that is not sealed comes loose. These pieces show both problems, mostly in a development setting, where the law on paper is always the easier part.
Rethinking State Capacity: A Practical Framework for Better Policy Implementation World Bank Governance blog
A practitioner’s framework for the distance between a rule that has been passed and a rule that actually runs. The part a donor can fund is the statute; the part no outside money can buy is what the people inside the system expect one another to do.
State Capacity and American Power Carnegie Endowment
State capacity, usually a thing we measure in poorer countries, turned on the United States. It is examined as a slow decay rather than a sudden break.
The rise and reversal of bureaucratic capacity: lessons from Chinese history Pavithra Suryanarayan
The reversal case, and the most bracing. State capacity is not a ladder you climb and then stay on; it can be taken apart on purpose by elites who find it threatens them. Suryanarayan uses Chinese history to show a capable bureaucracy being hollowed out to protect the very people it might otherwise have taxed or exposed. Capacity is a choice in both directions, which is why a win left unsealed does not simply sit there, safe.
The Death of Direct File Don Moynihan
A clean, recent case of a good reform coming apart for want of entrenchment. The IRS’s free tax-filing tool worked and was popular, and it was killed anyway. It is not really a story about the merits. It is a reform that was never sealed, and so cost nothing to reverse. Even a demonstrably good policy does not hold for free.
Merit vs. Tenure: Reforming Federal Firing Statecraft
The same fight at the level where it bites: job protection versus firing at will. Whether you change the people, wear down the working norms, or rewrite the law itself decides how hard the change is to undo — argued here by the people who have to live with the answer.
CAPTURING THE SCOREKEEPER
The cheapest way to shift a settlement is not to win the fight but to capture whoever keeps the score. Once a change counts only when a referee certifies it, the referee is the soft target. These pieces run from the legal theory of that capture to the live American case: the official who publishes the jobs numbers.
The Law of Constitutional Capture Laurence Claus
The legal spine of the idea. Claus describes how a government built for the common good can be rebuilt from the inside to serve its leadership by shifting the shared sense of where the real rule lies, until a shadow system of loyal officials becomes the thing everyone reads by.
The Strongman Presidency William Howell and Terry Moe, interviewed by Santi Ruiz
Howell and Moe on how a federal workforce that “were mostly mailmen” became the terrain of presidential control. This is the referee question in practice, and why wearing down the norms buys the most lasting effect for the least resistance, because no ordinary-politics defence and no clear statutory text ever catches it.
When trust in official statistics declines Nicholas Bloom, Erica Groshen, Duncan Hobbs and Michael R. Strain
After the August 2025 firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors estimate economic-policy uncertainty jumped more than 50% in the following week, with a hit to output that may have run to around $20 billion. The numbers measured by an outsider can be trusted, while the ones a graded official reports cannot be.