Neutral Institutional Monism (NIM)
This, as with all other things on this wiki, is a work in progress.
A term coined by Will Wilkinson in this blog post, which you should go read right now because it's awesome.
Anyway, here's how he summarized the idea elsewhere:
NIM is the thesis that there are institutions and there are institutions. The primary explanatory distinction is not coercive vs. non-coercive, or state vs. market, but between stable patterns of mutually advantageous interdependent action vs. unstable or mutually harmful patterns. This cuts across the coercive/non-coercive distinction.
See also Bruce Schneier on self-enforcing protocols.
Copyright © 2008, 2009 Edward O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0.
changed August 14, 2009