The Architecture of Civilizational Dysfunction (medium.com)

This essay argues that many “wicked problems” (poverty, climate change, political dysfunction) share a common root: reward hacking — the systemic replacement of an institution’s original purpose with the narrow optimization of measurable proxies. Using concrete examples (hospitals optimizing patient throughput, schools maximizing test scores, corporations chasing stock-price gains via buybacks), it shows how metrics that initially correlate with purpose become the target, driving behaviors that improve the metric while undermining the actual goal. The dynamic scales: competitive pressure favors metric-gaming, economic extraction concentrates power and wealth, and wealthy actors then “meta-hack” political systems (campaign funding, lobbying, regulatory capture) to entrench favorable metrics and legal frameworks. The result is reinforcing feedback loops that turn negative externalities into structural, civilization-level dysfunction. Technically, the piece frames reward hacking as a system-dynamics problem and proposes systemic fixes rather than piecemeal reforms. Key prescriptions: couple purpose and metrics via multidimensional measurement; involve stakeholders continuously in defining metrics; build anti-hacking mechanisms and meta-evaluation (auditing the audits); and redesign incentive environments (stakeholder governance, public funding of elections, wellbeing-based metrics instead of GDP). Finally, it emphasizes participatory democracy and community/worker control as practical necessities to keep institutions aligned with their stated purposes over time.