{"id":2959,"date":"2025-09-08T13:10:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T20:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=2959"},"modified":"2025-09-08T13:10:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T20:10:40","slug":"government-by-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/government-by-engineer\/","title":{"rendered":"Government by engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>The mistake that engineers sometimes make is that they assume by destroying [inefficient] institutions, you would necessarily be able to replace them with something better, which is not always the case \u2014 and it also ignores a lot of the wisdom that accretes slowly within the idiosyncratic practices and byways of an institution. Institutions sometimes have a hard time expressing their wisdom, but oftentimes it&#8217;s there, and [although] the things that institutions preserve may indeed be antiquated by the standards of optimization, they have enduring values as well.<\/p>\n<cite>Franklin Foer (via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.planetary.org\/planetary-radio\/franklin-foer-on-nasas-decline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Planetary Radio podcast, Sep 5, 2025<\/a>)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The mistake that engineers sometimes make is that they assume by destroying [inefficient] institutions, you would necessarily be able to replace them with something better, which is not always the case \u2014 and it also ignores a lot of the wisdom that accretes slowly within the idiosyncratic practices and byways of an institution. Institutions sometimes &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/government-by-engineer\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Government by engineer&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2959"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2960,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2959\/revisions\/2960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}