The article discusses how modern institutional economics has two main approaches: mainstream institutionalism and post-institutionalism. Post-institutionalism looks beyond the traditional ways of studying institutions and suggests new ways to understand their complexity. It proposes focusing on maximizing the value generated by institutions rather than just minimizing costs. Post-institutionalism also challenges the normocentric view of institutional theory and encourages exploring all forms of institutional evolution without negative labels. Overall, the article argues that to truly understand institutions, we need to move past simplistic methods used in mainstream institutional economics.