How We Evaluate Institutions

The starting point

Every political tradition begins by telling us what we ought to want. We begin somewhere humbler and, we believe, firmer:

People have interests, and people respond to incentives.

We do not assume people are good or wicked, or equal in talent, wealth, or virtue. We assume only that each person prefers some outcomes to others and acts, within the limits of their knowledge and power, to bring them about. To this we add one commitment, stated openly: each person’s interests count, they count roughly equally, and they are not wholly constituted by the institutions being judged.

Many will read that as a moral axiom. We also hold it for a harder-headed reason. It is the only accounting in which no person’s pressure goes unrecorded, and so the only one that does not have to be propped up by force.

The central claim

A society is healthy to the degree that its institutions make each person’s success depend on helping others succeed. It is sick to the degree that they make success depend on blocking others from pursuing their interests.

We call this incentive alignment. It is not a theory of what people should want. It is a theory of how institutions should be built, given that people want different things.

Institutions shape the landscape on which people optimize. On some landscapes, self-interest produces cooperation: the baker prospers by feeding the town, the doctor by healing it. On others it produces predation: the official prospers by extracting bribes, the monopolist by excluding rivals. People are much the same across these landscapes. The terrain differs. Where we find a system full of bad behavior, we should first suspect the terrain rather than the people.

So we ask political questions in a different order. We do not begin with “Who is virtuous?” We begin with: what are the incentive gradients here, and do they point in the same direction or in opposite ones?

Why we start here: the test case

The strongest test of any foundation is whether it can condemn the worst things without smuggling in assumptions it cannot defend. Slavery is the oldest such test.

We need only notice the structure. The enslaved person prefers better conditions to worse and autonomy to coercion. The master’s gain depends on suppressing those preferences. The relationship is adversarial by construction.

The argument goes further than “we choose to count the enslaved.” Suppression is not a closed transaction. A slave society must build patrols, police what free people may say and read, adopt a doctrine that some people may be owned, and run its households on command. The coercion that begins with the slave spreads to the poor, to women, to children, and to neighbors. It is also costly to maintain. An enslaved population is a force driven underground, not removed, and every unit of labor taken from it is paid for in surveillance and force. Sparta turned its own citizens into a permanent garrison to hold the helots down.

So counting everyone’s interests is not a moral premise added to get the right answer. It is what the analysis finds when the books are kept honestly. People left off the ledger keep acting as unpriced forces, and the society pays to suppress them.

What this framework does, and does not, do

Democracy is an instrument, not a foundation. A policy that enslaves a minority fails the alignment test however many people voted for it. We defend democratic institutions because elections, a free press, and open courts carry information about where incentives conflict, faster and more cheaply than any alternative we know.

Rights are discoveries. Property, free speech, contract, due process, freedom of movement, and abolition are best understood as technologies societies keep rediscovering because they reduce conflict. A right that cannot be enforced, or that is routinely outweighed by the incentives of those who administer it, is not an aligned institution. It is a decoration.

The proper role of the state is closer to a mechanism designer than a moral arbiter:

1. Detect incentive misalignments.
2. Internalize externalities, so that those who impose costs bear them.
3. Dismantle exploitative equilibria such as fraud, corruption, rent-seeking, and capture.
4. Facilitate positive-sum cooperation.
5. Protect the information channels through which misalignments are discovered.

What it does not replace. The framework does not tell a society what to value. It does not replace courts, which must still decide what happened. It does not replace defense. And it does not dissolve real scarcity: sometimes there is one seat and two claimants. It is an optimizer, not an objective function.

The Articles

Article 1. No institution shall depend on the systematic suppression of another person’s interests. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, and every disguised relative of them are condemned by this article, whatever name they go by and whatever majority supports them. We condemn them not only for what they do to the bound but for what they do to everyone else. Coercion learned on one class does not stay with that class.

Article 2. Those who impose costs shall bear them. Where a person can profit by pushing the costs of their activity onto others, the gradients diverge. Institutions must be designed so that private gain does not require public loss.

Article 3. Power shall not be able to insulate itself from correction. Every office, public or private, must be answerable to channels that can reveal its failures: free speech, a free press, transparent accounts, independent courts, and the freedom to exit. This applies to the system as a whole and not to every institution within it. A society may contain bodies whose commitments are irrevocable, provided it remains one in which leaving is possible and the conditions of correction stay intact.

Article 4. Rules shall be predictable. Cooperation requires that agents can anticipate the consequences of their actions. Arbitrary power, retroactive punishment, and capricious enforcement distort incentives as surely as theft.

Article 5. Rents shall be distrusted. Wherever income flows from position rather than contribution, from the capture of a regulator, the control of a chokepoint, or the manufacture of scarcity, the person’s interest has been decoupled from the interests of others. Such arrangements must be justified, bounded, and regularly reviewed.

Article 6. Exit shall be real. The freedom to leave a bad arrangement, whether an employer, a town, a contract, or a jurisdiction, is the most powerful alignment mechanism there is, because it forces institutions to compete to be worth staying in. Real means more than formal. A door that can be opened only at the price of one’s children, one’s livelihood, and everyone one loves is not a door, and costs imposed by the institution itself count against it.

Article 7. Institutions shall be tested, not worshipped. Every arrangement, including those we propose here, is a hypothesis about incentive structure. Those that fail must be changed, and changing them must be possible. What may be entrenched is the machinery of revision (free speech, elections, amendment procedures), not first-order outcomes removed from revision.

The rubric

1. Does it avoid making anyone's success depend on suppressing another person's interests?
2. Do those who impose costs bear them?
3. Can the institution be corrected from outside? Is the data public?
4. Is the rule predictable?
5. Does income flow from contribution rather than position or conflict?
6. Is exit or appeal real, not merely formal?
7. Is it testable and revisable, with a sunset or review clause?

Test question: Does the arrangement make each person's success depend on others' success, or on others' frustration?

Applying it to Ohio’s family courts

The rubric is general. Here is what each Article tends to ask of a family-court bill or practice:

• Article 1. Does the arrangement make one parent’s success depend on diminishing the other’s relationship with the child?
• Article 2. Does a party who makes a knowingly false allegation, or who interferes with court-ordered parenting time, bear the cost of doing so?
• Article 3. Can a parent, a researcher, or the public see what the courts decide and how children fare afterward? See priorities 4 and 12.
• Article 4. Would two similar families in different counties, or before different judges, get similar outcomes?
• Article 5. Do guardians ad litem, evaluators, and program providers earn more from prolonged conflict than from resolution?
• Article 6. Is appeal real, or is it so slow and expensive that the trial-level order is final in practice?
• Article 7. Does the proposal include data collection, a review date, or a sunset?

Protection is not traded away. Applying this rubric never means weakening protection from genuine abuse, neglect, or domestic violence. Every proposal on this site must state how genuine abuse, neglect, and domestic violence will still be caught and handled. Fast, low-barrier protective orders for real danger are preserved in every reform we support.

Lessons from the commons

Our nearest empirical ally is Elinor Ostrom, who studied communities that managed shared resources for centuries without collapse. Her explanation was not that these people were unusually virtuous. It was that they built institutions that aligned individual incentives with the health of the resource: clear boundaries, rules matched to local conditions, participation of those affected, accountable monitoring, graduated sanctions, and accessible conflict resolution.

She also disciplines us. Alignment is not designed from a desk. Rules that worked were built, tested, and revised by the people who lived with them. Our rubric supplies a question. The answers have to come from evidence, experiment, and the participation of those affected, which is why we insist on outcome data.

Limits we accept

• Alignment is not measurable in any simple way. We offer a question, not an index. Reasonable people will disagree about whether a given arrangement passes.
• Some conflicts are genuine scarcities. Not every disagreement can be designed away.
• Alignment can be bought with conformity. A system where everyone’s incentives agree because dissent has been made unthinkable has been silenced, not aligned. That is why Articles 3 and 6 are not optional.
• Our core is thin, not neutral. The premise that each person’s interests count roughly equally is a normative commitment. We state it rather than hide it.
• The test is necessary, not sufficient. A coherent system could still pursue ends we find wrong.

How we use it

Every bill on the tracker and every brief carries a short score against these seven questions, with written reasoning. That makes our positions predictable, citable, and open to correction. If you think we have scored something wrong, tell us.