Institutional reliability is often assumed by fiat rather than evidenced by data

Evidence

As a matter of simple descriptive fact, it appears that many institutions can be reliably expected to fulfill their missions. It would be odd if this were merely a regularity or a hard law of nature. I can predict an organization’s reliability from a lot of data, but I have no reason to think the organization especially takes my interests somehow into consideration. If we cannot meet the latter condition, we can only say we have a regularity from which we induce a tendency, as we infer future expectations about many things from the mere fact that they have been true up until now. In discussions of government we often do not even have such inductive evidence, and the question of government reliability is often resolved by fiat. It is merely assumed that the officials in an organization act, for example, from the desire to accomplish some organizational goal of service (as argued by Paul Quirk ). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 707

Categorization

• XREF: Hardin’s ‘regularity without interests’ claim deepens the reader’s trust framework — observability gives way to assumed benevolence, which collapses under stress exactly as the epidemiological internment breaks down in Saramago. — connects to: Economic theories serve as blueprints for institutions, and faulty theories produce fragile ones — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 120