The Paradox of Rational Accumulation: Local Reason, Systemic Harm, and a Theory of Institutional Life in Late Modernity by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
The Paradox of Rational Accumulation: Local Reason, Systemic Harm, and a Theory of Institutional Life in Late Modernity Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Merged draft — for review and revision Abstract Modern institutions routinely produce outcomes that virtually none of their participants explicitly intend and that few would defend if asked to evaluate them as wholes. Hospitals discharge medically stable patients. Shelters enforce intake windows. Cities remove infrastructure in response to isolated complaints. Security systems authenticate users according to protocol. Each decision may be reasonable within the institutional setting in which it occurs. Yet when such decisions accumulate across organizations, time, and space, their combined consequences can become exclusionary, absurd, or lethal. This article develops the concept of the Paradox of Rational Accumulation : the condition in which actions that are locally rational within bounded institutional frameworks combin...