The hottest Institutional Design Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Business Topics

💰🧪 Funding outside the box: A Quick Q&A with … philanthropy expert Stuart Buck

Faster, Please! • 456 implied HN points • 11 Dec 25
🔬 Science Institutional Design
  1. Government research funders are risk-averse because they must show accountability to taxpayers and avoid political backlash, so many high-risk, curiosity-driven projects that can produce big breakthroughs go unfunded.
  2. Wealthy philanthropists can back unconventional, high-risk research because they aren’t tied to voter accountability, but most still give to safe, prestigious institutions unless they’re actively incentivized or advised to take bolder bets.
  3. Growing institutional diversity and nudging more creative philanthropy would raise the chances of major discoveries, but private donations alone can’t fully replace large-scale federal R&D funding cuts.

I wrote a book. Here’s why.

Anima Mundi • 123 implied HN points • 20 Jan 26
🪑 Design Institutional Design
  1. Don’t try to patch old systems; replace them by building new institutions designed to adapt and operate in parallel with the old ones so real change can take hold.
  2. Treat institutions as adaptive systems that must sense, decide, and act, and use concrete design patterns like bounded authority plus short implementation playbooks to build real adaptive capacity.
  3. Focus on action: target builders who will construct and scale these institutions and give them practical toolkits, workshops, and machine‑readable frameworks so they can implement the ideas.

Innovations in Scientific Institutions

The Good Science Project • 100 implied HN points • 13 Dec 25
🔬 Science Institutional Design
  1. Governments are starting to fund independent, team-level labs with large, flexible grants so scientific teams can pursue ambitious work without constant grant-writing.
  2. Public-private partnerships like the UK–DeepMind deal are building automated, high-throughput labs to speed materials discovery and tackle big practical problems.
  3. There’s a push to create new applied R&D organizations to increase institutional diversity, and these programs must set clear tolerance for failure so teams can take real risks.

In (partial) defense of less democracy

Matt’s Five Points • 0 implied HN points • 28 Sep 11
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics Institutional Design
  1. Democracy is generally the best form of government we have, but it's not perfect. While it's better than other systems, it often has flaws and can be complicated.
  2. There are situations where democracy might not be the best choice, like long-term planning or during wars. In some cases, more centralized decision-making could be more effective.
  3. Democracy and majoritarianism are not the same. You can have a system that is democratic but still requires a lot of agreement among people, which can slow down decision-making.
Get a weekly roundup of the best Substack posts, by hacker news affinity: