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J. Bradford DeLong had a piece on the potential for corporations to resemble command economies many years ago; it would be interesting to see a more recent pers

• harpiaharpyja 9y ago
  Thanks for the link! This passage stuck out at me: "But we were all told a decade ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, that hierarchical organizations simply did not work as modes of organizing economic life--that you needed a market in order to achieve anything better than low-productivity, bureaucracy-ridden economic stagnation. What, then, are all these large corporations--ATT and IBM, General Motors and Toyota, Microsoft and USX--doing? What methods of corporate control have saved them from turning into smaller versions of the unproductive Soviet economy?" Given some of the tales of corporate excesses that I have heard, I would answer... absolutely nothing. Thankfully we are still far enough away from the situation where a few megacorporations dominate our everyday lives (as worrying as the recent trends are) that society at large is shielded from this.
  • eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Bureaucratic state-socialists used to brag that the growth of large trusts and joint-stock corporations was capitalism building the infrastructure for socialism. I agree with them in the respect they meant it, but nowadays we know that's kind of a bad thing: building up a massive bureaucratic apparatus is a bad thing.