So fun. Would be interesting to see tractability assessments for all the ideas.
Have you looked at Catholic institutions at all? They’ve done a good job of maintaining a cohered worldview over a long timespan (and also of growing very rich).
I am extremely interested in the question of how religions transmit ideas and values across many generations, but at the current moment I have no idea how they do this so successfully. If anyone has ideas or empirical sources on this I’d be quite keen to get more info on this.
You might be interested in this (courtesy of Gwern):
The Corporate Governance of Benedictine Abbeys: What can Stock Corporations Learn from Monasteries?
The corporate governance structure of monasteries is analyzed to derive new insights into solving agency problems of modern corporations. In the long history of monasteries, some abbots and monks lined their own pockets and monasteries were undisciplined. Monasteries developed special systems to check these excesses and therefore were able to survive for centuries. These features are studied from an economic perspective. Benedictine monasteries in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and German speaking Switzerland have an average lifetime of almost 500 years and only a quarter of them broke up as a result of agency problems. We argue that this is due to an appropriate governance structure, relying strongly on the intrinsic motivation of the members and on internal control mechanisms.
So fun. Would be interesting to see tractability assessments for all the ideas.
Have you looked at Catholic institutions at all? They’ve done a good job of maintaining a cohered worldview over a long timespan (and also of growing very rich).
I am extremely interested in the question of how religions transmit ideas and values across many generations, but at the current moment I have no idea how they do this so successfully. If anyone has ideas or empirical sources on this I’d be quite keen to get more info on this.
You might be interested in this (courtesy of Gwern):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1137090
Yeah, it’s a great question.
For Catholic stuff, The Great Heresies looks interesting, though old. (I haven’t read it.)
I have thoughts about Mahayana Buddhist value transmission. Probably best to DM about that.
I bet Leah Libresco would have good thoughts on Catholic value transmission. Message me if an intro would be helpful.
Also this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-oldest-institution-organization-that-exists-today
Some people would say that the Church exemplifies how an elite opmized for their own welfare instead of christian values, though.