> Why does changing (fixing) these things take so damn long? Because: a. Established interests profit from the current arrangement or worry that their intere

> Why does changing (fixing) these things take so damn long? Because: a. Established interests profit from the current arrangement or worry that their interests will be compromised if things chang. b. Our system is set up to resist rapid precipitous radical change. c. Changing institutions takes a long time and requires much political will, or at least alignment with social forces in play. d. Change has costs; even if the existing system is wasteful, dysfunctional and cruelly indifferent to the pain it causes to some subset of the people in contact with an institution. The costs of changing that institution are unknown and unknowable and the argument against from fear of the unknown will always have weight with decisionmakers. e. Institutional change always has winners and losers, and often the ones with the most to lose are close to but not at; the top of the hierarchy. That's the short version. The long version involves quantitative social science and figuring out which nodes of the power network have the capability to drive change and which must be routed around to effect change and which ones are likely to be obstacles to change. Modeling the political economy of even a small institution is a considerable effort; and since it's hard to get people to precisely quantify their biases and predilections even if they are cooperative; a large amount of it is guesswork or inference from extremely thin sources ( like trying to divine someones political allegiances based on the corpus of emails that are sent to internal mailing lists ). And since Psychohistory is bunk, there is no plausible way to predict second or third order effects ( the response to the response to the change you are trying to achieve if it were successful ). There are only a few organizations that have the mathematical ability, computational power and access to significant communications between decision makers to even attempt to do this at scale. In fact I can only think of one that could attempt to do so at a global scale; and it's a TLA whose initials start with N, end with A, and have an S in the middle. But they wouldn't try to manipulate their host society like that; or would they?