Structural question vs character question

Two different questions that can be asked about exactly the same behaviour.

A character question asks what kind of people these are. Lazy or hardworking, honest or not, serious about the work or not. It is the question most people reach for first, because the behaviour is visible and the person doing it is standing right there.

A structural question asks what arrangement makes that behaviour the reasonable thing to do, who built the arrangement, when, and what they were getting out of it. It does not ask you to un-see the behaviour. It asks one further thing about it: what the behaviour is evidence of.

Both are real questions. Only the structural one has an answer that can be checked against a document, which is why this course runs on it.

Source: Course-coined for this build, as the plain-language entry point to a distinction that arrives with its full apparatus later. Its academic parents are Douglass North (1990) on institutions as the rules of the game, and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012), whose explicit claim is that nations fail because of institutions rather than geography, ignorance or culture. Free citable version of the latter: the Nobel committee’s scientific background for the 2024 prize, nobelprize.org.

First used in: 0.1 · Start where the shame is