Protos

Why do institutions form?

• Cultural and social norms as a kind of institution
• Social cogs and wheels can produce persistent social structures and social forces which in turn may evolve institution like objects
• Agents can learn to coordinate and work with each other as in reinforcement learning
• Conscious deliberation about agents may give rise to birth of institutions

Why do institutions lead to inequality?

• ???

At what point do we call it an "institution?"

Questions:

• When looking at a collection of "intelligent" entities (say a small population of ants), at what level in our analysis do we say there is an "organization" or "group", rather than several individual entities?
• What criteria do we use to determine that a collection of entities is a group that has a collective purpose and indulges in actions that are deliberately intentional and focused on addressing the group's overarching goals? Surely, these criteria have to be context-specific. Are there "universal" principles for intuiting/deducing/inferring what these criteria are (or ought to be) in a particular context?