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This is a good observation but one can argue that those devoted to themselves are a subset of those devoted to the organization (to further their goals, they act as being part of the second category, since that's the most profitable)



That's a fine interpretation, but the observable evidence lately would indicate otherwise. The two terms to look into are "institutions as platforms" from Yuval Levin at the American Enterprise Institute [0], describing congressional representatives who spend more staff budget on comms than policy and more of their time on cable news hits than on committee meetings. The second is "public choice theory" economics which is the branch of economics describing why policy doesn't align with stated goals on a regular basis. Robin Hanson had a good substack on the second one just today, in fact [1].

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/01/30/800922222/when-institutions-a... [1] - https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-big-econ-error


If you're being paid by the organization, you're being paid for something. Either for work that accretes to the goals of the organization, work that accretes to the organization itself, or some combination of the two




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