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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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391–400 of 592 posts

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#391

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving pro…

This is certainly true in Silicon Valley. It provides an interesting tentative answer to the question that has been posed by some AI optimists about what people are going to do with all their leisure time after the AI is able to do their jobs for them.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#392

He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the question of why have firms at all - big or small. The “market” ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) - but his “Theory of the firm” suggests that there are complex processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for. So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug…

Coase was a founder of the field sometimes called "New Institutional Economics" and I think Terry is basically independently reaching some of the conclusions that have already been published in that field, including some of Coase's.

I think North, Wallis, and Weingast's Violence and Social Orders is a little more directly on point to his posts, but I believe I share at least part of your point of view here — and would love to see a precis of the magnum opus!

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#393

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans. * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not con…

Isn't this part of why crypto has been so successful — at least outside the U.S. where the fiat currency isn't as stable?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#394
post #40

In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of American success to its small organizations/associations: "There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America.... In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one." [0] https://press.uc…

Great connection to draw. Ben Franklin too spent much time creating and cultivating the strength of small grassroots organizations.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>middle-class right here is the problem

One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply, contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the erosion of the middle class. But that wasn’t the only cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and regressive taxes were also factors.

Expanding the labor supply does not decrease wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

More people = more economy = higher wages. Otherwise killing people and stopping other people from having children would increase your pay.

As for the middle class, most of the reason for the decline is people moving into the upper class.

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#396

> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer. This premise ignores the existence of the Internet. Wherein small groups of distributed actors can combine their efforts through a nearly instantaneous communications mechanism to match that of the larger groups. The federal government was conceived when horses we…

I agree that global communication technology has been part of what has shifted the balance from small to large. But there's still a fundamental tension between where people live and who they can communicate with. I may form a startup with coworkers all over the world, but we cannot get in a room together unless we get on planes, get visas, etc.

In fact, I would say this is a key source of the tension between large and small that Terry has identified. Yes, large organizations are more efficient at most of what we need as humans. But our ape brains still benefit from being close enough to smell the people we're working with. Until we evolve biologically, it's going to be a problem that it's so much easier to work remotely than it is to work together in person. And the world is only making it harder to do the latter right now.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#397
post #45

Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the reduction in the barrier to entry with the help…

This is my hope too. But we need government to improve in its efficiency along with the small groups that can leverage AI into providing more of what government wants. I have some personal experience here. Local political action has never been easier in terms of producing the artifacts required by government to take formal action (petitions, resolutions, etc.). But the clerks, mayors, and council members who are responsible for making decisions can't read any faster!

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#398
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any source for this? My hunch is that there is so much money sloshing around that government interests are easily swayed and conflicts of interest are relatively common now.

What would be an acceptable source for you? Which was the last US mega-corporation that the US government broke up? It certainly wasn't Microsoft or Google. Allowing huge companies to grow even bigger gives them more competitive power in the global market. This wasn't as important before we had super-globalized economies.

I don't think the question is whether monopolies are being allowed to exist, my question is what is the source as to WHY you think it is happening. A source would be any kind of proof that having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries. Data, publications, etc...

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#399
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.

[dead]

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#400
post #135

Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the “large complex system” environment. It is only individuals and small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations and large complex systems are both emergent, one with hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has really changed is how unequal small organiza…

I think I basically agree with this perspective, but I might try to add some nuance. As organizations become larger, there is a tendency for them to become less and less efficient. This seems to be linked to the second law of thermodynamics, which applies to information the same way it applies to matter.

One way to address the relative inefficiency of a larger organization is to consume more energy and not worry about the waste on entropy. This works so long as the large organization is growing — i.e., so long as it is able to extract more energy from its environment than it is wasting (in a relative sense) on its internal processes.

The strategies for minimizing entropy within an organization — large or small — seem to boil down to two, which are intertwined: 1) what @pg called "Founder Mode" and 2) alignment around mission and vision. In both cases, the effect is to drive the organization towards a "critical state" in which small details of information picked up at the edges can be shared relatively quickly across the entire organization, allowing every part of the organization to react in alignment to that new information. In the case of 1), this is facilitated by a dictator (i.e., the founder) who everybody willingly submits decisions to when they themselves are unsure of how the founder would decide. In the case of 2), this is facilitated by a shared understanding of what the "right" decision is across the organization in view of the mission and vision, which are clear and crisp enough to answer most questions, even about relatively obscure issues or questions that arise.

The ability to operate at scale seems more or less to be derived from one or both of these. Coase's theory of the firm in The Nature of the Firm can be understood in these terms — that is, 1) and 2) are the mechanism whereby internal management outperforms spot markets in coordinating production.

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