94. Institutions and collective choice

The word society is easily applied to a collection of agents that exchange messages. That usage conceals distinctions important to both mathematics and social theory. A cluster of predictors controlled by one scheduler may act as a coherent unit while having no independent decision centers. A set of autonomous services may compete for resources yet lack shared institutions. Conversely, a population may sustain institutions, disagreements, and an archive of precedents while possessing no coherent global policy. None of these arrangements is contradictory. They occupy different parts of the space of possible organizations.