I’m Duff Young. I study the large knock-on effects that can follow from small institutional design choices, especially when those effects compound over time.
I focus on cases along the Windsor–Montréal corridor: places where institutions help people become more capable, places where people get stuck, and the mechanisms that might explain the difference.
I came to these questions through action. After decades advising people with capital, including virtuous elites, a puzzle began to gnaw at me: Why does good intention so often fail—and when do systems make bad behaviour pay?
So I spent the last five years working at street level in homelessness, trying to understand what happens when good intentions meet institutions in practice.
This site is where I’m working things out in public: field notes, cases, essays and observations from along the corridor.