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On being the right size (1928)

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Re: On being the right size (1928)

#31

Post by adventured »

breakyerself wrote: post #13

This is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationaliz…

Under Capitalism, if a worker disagrees with how their boss allocates their time and labor, the worker is free to start a new business just as the founder once had to.

The worker is also free to seek superior employment, if they feel their worth is not being fully appreciated / utilized (and so on and so forth).

Workers aren't appreciated at Business X? Start Business Z that treats its employees better. There are countless examples of this in practice over the last 150 years.

Unions are also properly legal under Capitalism. That is, the free assembly of labor. If employees don't like how they are being treated, they can collectively negotiate to try to acquire more leverage.

That completely removes your complaint about allocation of labor and accountability. Also, your entire premise rests on the notion that people are owed a particular job - just try telling nature it owes you shelter and three meals a day. The reality is, the capital to fund that job comes from someone that had to first create it. The West is losing this century because it has become lazy and hyper-entitled.

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#32

Post by gnarbarian »

jl6 wrote: post #23
breakyerself wrote: post #13

This is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationaliz…

>someone other than the people doing the work get to decide how the work is done and how to spend the surplus of value that work generates. Who do you mean here? Foreman, manager, executive, owner... these are all real jobs that do real work.

he must mean people like this:

“He eats lunch when he arrives at work at 2 p.m. Then, like clockwork, he goes to sleep with a cup of soda on the table and the straw in it,” said Marvin Robbins, a union vice president.

http://nypost.com/2013/05/28/labor-big-a-real-heavy-sleeper/

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#33

Post by bcoates »

breakyerself wrote: post #13

This is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationaliz…

> If the workers decided these things they would never vote to outsource their own jobs

This implies they would be making the wrong decisions then, no? There needs to be some mechanism to decide who does what, or otherwise some goods and services will be produced in proportions well exceeding any possible demand.

> The main idea is to make the enterprises benefit those who do the actual work and also make them accountable to those people and their communities.

Once you start introducing multiple contradictory goals like this, you're back to the same problem that centrally planned capitalism and communism have: resolving these conflicts is an extremely difficult problem in an informational/computational sense.

The local blacksmiths are of the opinion that only locally hand-wrought nails make the finest boots. The local bootmakers are of the opinion that the nails they can get for $1000/ton from China will suffice. The bootmakers are convinced that they are being idled by the limited supply of local nails, and that the blacksmiths are able to demand an unreasonable share of the value created from the boots because they have made their contribution to the boot scarce.

Do you sacrifice the supply of boots or outsource the work of the blacksmiths?

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#34

Post by tehwalrus »

jl6 wrote: post #23
breakyerself wrote: post #13

This is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationaliz…

>someone other than the people doing the work get to decide how the work is done and how to spend the surplus of value that work generates. Who do you mean here? Foreman, manager, executive, owner... these are all real jobs that do real work.

Out of interest, what do you think an 'owner' does in an enterprise with an executive branch, apart from supplying passive capital at the start?

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#35

Post by sejje »

tbrake wrote: post #12
xerophtye wrote: post #8

As amazing as the article is, i have one confusion. What about dinosaurs? In the eagle part, he said eagles CAN'T be as big as tigers etc. But what about Pterodactyls? How did they manage to be so big? Oh and weren't all the dinosaurs cold-blooded? So, if I am not mistaken, didn't the author say that we get over the problem of heat loss by being warm-blooded? Or does that just mean that they had to eat ALOT more? (th…

Pterodactyls were small. They had roughly the same wingspan as the modern bald eagle.

Maybe if bald eagles had 36-foot wingspans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#37

Post by tracker1 »

nn3 wrote: post #6

As opposed to the maximum size I find it more interesting what the minimum size of organisations is (Haldane's example was the mouse's eye): Can you write viable software with a small team ( Can you write very complex software like a distributed database or a web browser with a small team ( Can you develop a CPU with a small team ( Can you develop the silicon process needed to make the CPU with a small team? (<100) N…

In all of your examples, it depends on the team, their skill level as individuals and how well they communicate... the large the extended teams that have to coordinate, the larger a part communication takes, and the less time each member of a team has to accomplish any work. In software, I've seen this time and again. Adding more people to a team is sometimes a very bad thing.

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#38

Post by bcoates »

nephorider wrote: post #19

the "biological part" in the article is good and seems to be factual. The political conclusion looks however more"cut and paste there".

A decade later, Coase worked out the economic argument in much more detail in "The Nature of the Firm". (The logic works the same for business enterprises in a market economy as it does for nation- or world-sized Communist economies)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#39

Post by tbrake »

sejje wrote: post #35
tbrake wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pterodactyls were small. They had roughly the same wingspan as the modern bald eagle.

Maybe if bald eagles had 36-foot wingspans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus

I wasn't intending to be nitpicking or pedantic when I wrote it - it was just something I remembered off the top of my head - but those aren't, strictly speaking, pterodactyls. I hadn't considered that the use was the generic term.

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterodactyloidea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosauria

(Technically correct; the best kind of correct.)

Re: On being the right size (1928)

#40

Post by gnarbarian »

breakyerself wrote: post #13

This is really an argument against socialism as the communists tried to implement it. Where the state nationalizes every industry and all workers become employed by the state which plans everything centrally. Most socialists have moved beyond that model and would instead prefer to see a system of enterprise that uses co-op's instead of privately or publicly owned business. Some industries would probably be nationaliz…

I think that some industries/services would fare much better as co-ops. And you're free to start one and do it that way. I prefer credit-unions to banks. I would love to see more co-op style ISPs.

Complaining that your co-op can't compete with the more private entity and thus must be propped up or the competitor handicapped is very bad though and has a negative results for consumers at large.

When they can compete with privately held monopolies supplying the same service it's a win-win situation for us. Forcing places to be co-ops is not a good idea though and equates to a different kind of tyranny.

Large Companies, Governments, and even Democratic majorities (think racism) can all be tyrannical and there is no silver bullet to eliminating it.

You could say I'm libertarian leaning, but I also acknowledge the reality of large organizations which can be nearly as oppressive as the state and harbor similar levels of inefficiency.

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