EndsandMeans

CHALLENGE / OPEN QUESTION

How can institutions change from a specified starting point, and who bears the costs and risks of transition?

A transition is a path with actors, sequencing, resistance, and failure modes—not a property of an ideal endpoint.

All responses below are migrated research leads, not reviewed conclusions.

COMPARISON FRAME

What this question helps us inspect

A transition is a path with actors, sequencing, resistance, and failure modes—not a property of an ideal endpoint.

The comparison below keeps the question fixed while the tradition changes. This makes differences in proposed Means and anticipated failures easier to examine without implying that every tradition is internally uniform.

COMPARATIVE RESPONSE LEDGER

How traditions propose to respond

Open a tradition overview for its wider orientation, boundaries, and full set of Challenge responses.

01

TRADITION / DRAFT

Laissez-faire capitalism

Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Deregulation and retrenchment (Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet's Chile).

Failure hypotheses

  • Politically hard to sustain; every attempt stopped well short of the model.
02Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Incremental, electoral, proven repeatedly (New Deal, postwar Europe, Nordic reforms).

Failure hypotheses

  • Can be reversed incrementally too; the path is real but never finished.
03Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Schweickart assumes a "landslide election." Wright's "interstitial" strategy: grow the co-op sector until it is dominant. Sweden's 1976 Meidner Plan (wage-earner funds buying into firms) was the serious attempt.

Failure hypotheses

  • Meidner was defeated politically and dismantled by 1991; co-op share of most economies has stayed small for a century.
04

TRADITION / DRAFT

Central planning

Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Revolution or conquest in every historical case.

Failure hypotheses

  • No electoral path exists; the transitions were violent.
05

TRADITION / DRAFT

Social anarchism

Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Revolution (Spain, Ukraine) or prefiguration (build the new inside the old).

Failure hypotheses

  • Revolutionary cases were destroyed; prefigurative cases stay small.
06Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Arose under authoritarian regimes facing security threats (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) or after a prior collapse (China).

Failure hypotheses

  • No democratic society has adopted it deliberately; the path ran through dictatorship.
07

TRADITION / DRAFT

Anarcho-capitalism

Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Secession, seasteading, charter cities, "startup societies."

Failure hypotheses

  • No path from an existing state; charter-city attempts (Honduras) were reversed.
08Research needed

Proposed Means

  • Prefigurative: build participatory workplaces and councils.

Failure hypotheses

  • No path proposed beyond example-setting.

RESEARCH STATE

What remains to be established

The entries preserve editorial hypotheses from the initial comparison material. They still need attribution, direct sources, boundaries around variants, concrete cases, and serious competing interpretations.

No statement on this page should yet be read as a verified claim about theory or practice.