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I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people wi

by swiley 8y ago

I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit.

treerock 8y ago
I'm curious. I've read a few (mostly fictional) accounts of early companies, and the drive for profit seemed stronger (if anything) than it is now.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Companies began as a means to have an endeavour progress while the people involved changed [0]. The nature of the endeavour could be profit, but by no means had to be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History
- adventured 8y ago
  I've read just about every non-fiction account I can get my hands on about business in the ~1850-1930 era. The drive for profit during the industrial revolution, was radically stronger than it is today. The giants of industry back then openly lusted after success, it was culturally acceptable to behave that way (right up to the point where you were dominant, then the people turned against you). They made no apologies for the all-out pursuit of profit back then. Rockefeller dressed it up slightly, by proclaiming that god wanted him to be rich, that to be wealthy was glorious. The so called robber barons lived in openly ostentatious ways that today's rich in the US would mostly never dream of; today most of them go out of their way to pretend they're not so rich and to hide it. Open shows of wealth today are considered closer to vulgarity, crude, disgusting, etc. Back then, it was far less widely believed that wealth was stolen from 'the people'; today, it's widely believed that the rich are all thieves in some considerable manner. There was no welfare state at all, income taxes were extremely low or non-existent, so the accumulation of wealth happened far faster. Companies often paid extremely high dividends 10 to 20 times higher than is normal today. Tactics, when it came to dealing with competition, were far beyond anything you see today. There were few regulations in the US, so companies were free to devise all manners of schemes to best their competitors. The treatment of labor in the pursuit of profit, was similarly far more brutal (there's really no comparison, Amazon's warehouse workers are treated like kings compared to sweatshop workers back then).
  - dieterrams 8y ago
    Do you have a short list of book recommendations?
quantummkv 8y ago
The East India Company (amongst many others) did heinous stuff solely to make a profit. If anything, the drive for profit is a little less now.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  I'm not sure the drive is less so much as PR is a thing, better regulation is a thing and the internet makes corporations misdeeds much more transparent. This is one of the reasons among many I regard the decline in proper journalism as so worrying.
roenxi 8y ago
If anyone knows what I'm trying to say and can put it in clearer words that'd be lovely, I think I'm missing an important linking idea here. Anyway... Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph. There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. Now, at B, we have 50 people. They all chose the right path voluntarily, they all made a choice. None of them knew about the wolves though. How do we catagorise this situation in term of having and not having made a "real" choice? I argue that in practice, whatever the people were thinking when they chose B was irrelevant, because they didn't know the thing that actually mattered and they didn't have a proxy variable for it. With that setup, I'd argue companies that "help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit" are a lot like my right path, in that the people may not have been focused on maximising profits, but if they didn't achieve them they wouldn't have lasted long. By evolution, there will be a decided drift towards companies maximising profits even if all the individuals actually making the choices think they are doing something real (or I suppose, the converse where they think that their job is meaningless).
- jackpirate 8y ago
  This is something like "survivorship bias", but that term is usually applied to extreme outliers like CEOs rather that average case people like you're doing.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
That's not right. USA Antitrust law was invented around 1900 to fight excesses is service of profile. A corporation could be chartered for any reason. What is true is that in the early 19th century there was a legal pretense that corporations had to justify their charter to the government in order to be approved and renewed. One of the very first corporations in USA was Alexander Hamilton's bank, that ran a water utility as a front operation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company The old days weren't as honorable as the stories whitewash. But not-just-for-profit corporations have existed for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification... is a modern trend.
aikah 8y ago
> I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit. You might want to have a look at an history book then. Companies had slaves, got kids working in mines, got to use the government to shout their workers who rebelled because they had no rights whatsoever, or just straight up used private armies. It was all pre 20th century already. If all this was not solely to make a profit, I don't know what it was. Furthermore the great majority of big ventures were family driven. There were not formal associations between "people with similar goals" who weren't blood related.

by swiley 8y ago

treerock 8y ago

I'm curious. I've read a few (mostly fictional) accounts of early companies, and the drive for profit seemed stronger (if anything) than it is now.

EliRivers 8y ago
Companies began as a means to have an endeavour progress while the people involved changed [0]. The nature of the endeavour could be profit, but by no means had to be. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History
adventured 8y ago
I've read just about every non-fiction account I can get my hands on about business in the ~1850-1930 era. The drive for profit during the industrial revolution, was radically stronger than it is today. The giants of industry back then openly lusted after success, it was culturally acceptable to behave that way (right up to the point where you were dominant, then the people turned against you). They made no apologies for the all-out pursuit of profit back then. Rockefeller dressed it up slightly, by proclaiming that god wanted him to be rich, that to be wealthy was glorious. The so called robber barons lived in openly ostentatious ways that today's rich in the US would mostly never dream of; today most of them go out of their way to pretend they're not so rich and to hide it. Open shows of wealth today are considered closer to vulgarity, crude, disgusting, etc. Back then, it was far less widely believed that wealth was stolen from 'the people'; today, it's widely believed that the rich are all thieves in some considerable manner. There was no welfare state at all, income taxes were extremely low or non-existent, so the accumulation of wealth happened far faster. Companies often paid extremely high dividends 10 to 20 times higher than is normal today. Tactics, when it came to dealing with competition, were far beyond anything you see today. There were few regulations in the US, so companies were free to devise all manners of schemes to best their competitors. The treatment of labor in the pursuit of profit, was similarly far more brutal (there's really no comparison, Amazon's warehouse workers are treated like kings compared to sweatshop workers back then).
- dieterrams 8y ago
  Do you have a short list of book recommendations?

quantummkv 8y ago

The East India Company (amongst many others) did heinous stuff solely to make a profit. If anything, the drive for profit is a little less now.

noir_lord 8y ago
I'm not sure the drive is less so much as PR is a thing, better regulation is a thing and the internet makes corporations misdeeds much more transparent. This is one of the reasons among many I regard the decline in proper journalism as so worrying.

roenxi 8y ago

If anyone knows what I'm trying to say and can put it in clearer words that'd be lovely, I think I'm missing an important linking idea here. Anyway... Imagine there are two paths from A to B (the left and right path). 100 people walk from A to B. Half take the left and half the right, and none of them have any information not in this paragraph. There are wolves on the left path. Everyone who travels it gets eaten. Now, at B, we have 50 people. They all chose the right path voluntarily, they all made a choice. None of them knew about the wolves though. How do we catagorise this situation in term of having and not having made a "real" choice? I argue that in practice, whatever the people were thinking when they chose B was irrelevant, because they didn't know the thing that actually mattered and they didn't have a proxy variable for it. With that setup, I'd argue companies that "help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit" are a lot like my right path, in that the people may not have been focused on maximising profits, but if they didn't achieve them they wouldn't have lasted long. By evolution, there will be a decided drift towards companies maximising profits even if all the individuals actually making the choices think they are doing something real (or I suppose, the converse where they think that their job is meaningless).

jackpirate 8y ago
This is something like "survivorship bias", but that term is usually applied to extreme outliers like CEOs rather that average case people like you're doing.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

That's not right. USA Antitrust law was invented around 1900 to fight excesses is service of profile. A corporation could be chartered for any reason. What is true is that in the early 19th century there was a legal pretense that corporations had to justify their charter to the government in order to be approved and renewed. One of the very first corporations in USA was Alexander Hamilton's bank, that ran a water utility as a front operation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company The old days weren't as honorable as the stories whitewash. But not-just-for-profit corporations have existed for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification... is a modern trend.

aikah 8y ago

> I was under the impression that pre 20th century companies just existed as a legal and organizational convenience in order to help collect a number of people with similar goals rather than to solely make a profit. You might want to have a look at an history book then. Companies had slaves, got kids working in mines, got to use the government to shout their workers who rebelled because they had no rights whatsoever, or just straight up used private armies. It was all pre 20th century already. If all this was not solely to make a profit, I don't know what it was. Furthermore the great majority of big ventures were family driven. There were not formal associations between "people with similar goals" who weren't blood related.