Institutional sclerosis

Institutional sclerosis is the progressive loss of adaptive capacity in organizations, political systems, or scientific communities as they age. Unlike biological senescence, institutional sclerosis is not inevitable; it is a network property that emerges when an institution's internal reward structures become decoupled from its external function. The institution continues to operate, to consume resources, and to expand — but it no longer solves the problems it was created to solve.

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev is the paradigmatic case. The planning apparatus did not collapse because it ran out of resources or because it was overthrown; it collapsed because it had spent decades optimizing for internal coherence — meeting targets, suppressing dissent, maintaining ideological uniformity — at the expense of external accuracy. The network had become a self-sealing system, in which feedback from reality was systematically filtered out as ideological