Institutions Let Us Pretend While Getting What We Want

Our usual institutions let us pretend to pursue the things we say we want while actually delivering, under the surface, the things we really want. Policy analysts fail because they propose reforms that deliver more of what we pretend to want, which we're uninterested in; a reform succeeds only if it lets us keep up the pretense of pursuing the noble goal while actually getting more of what we truly want — but if an analyst names this out loud, we reject it because we can't admit it.