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> when a corporation is unable to collect enough money to continue operating, it goes out of business This is different from saying an organization is ineffici

> when a corporation is unable to collect enough money to continue operating, it goes out of business This is different from saying an organization is inefficient. From my experience in the corporate world, some businesses can be VERY inefficient compared to other businesses and still be getting enough done to move the ball forward to the satisfaction of stakeholders. As much as people complain about bureaucratic government organizations being too inefficient, I'm not convinced that they are less efficient than many "successful" large corporations. The difference is that they are essentially like a non-profit and complaints are made without sufficiently measuring the value of their work (especially in comparison to massive for-profit organizations). I'm not saying more nimble organizations cannot produce more per-capita value, but there are disadvantages with size and also sometimes advantages such as economy of scale.

bhupy 6y ago
It’s not different, because businesses that are “VERY inefficient” often end up dying. There’s no structural permanence baked into the corporate system that guarantees that a corporation will exist forever. On the other hand, governments and state actors are largely static. The institutions and systems that govern them seldom change. And the larger the polity, the harder it is to build up the political will for democratic institutions to evolve/change. It is very difficult (IMO impossible) for an inefficient government to “go out of business”, so to speak. > There are disadvantages with size and also sometimes advantages such as economy of scale This is absolutely correct, but the market system ensures that whichever corporation becomes large enough to deliver on those economies of scale is selected as a function of their ability to deliver (for the most part). Ask yourself what would happen if we democratically granted Sears a legally authorized monopoly to essentially exist in perpetuity like states and state programs exist today. Would they have been able to efficiently continue delivering value as the world changed? Would we have allowed them to die and be replaced? The fact that they were defeated to the point of bankruptcy by Amazon et al is a feature of the system that is notably lacking in state institutions. In fact, the state institutions that perform the best are the ones that are the smallest/most decentralized: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-podcast-breakingvi/breakingviews-the-exchange-too-small-to-fail-idUSKBN21P3E3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-podcas...
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > It is very difficult (IMO impossible) for an inefficient government to “go out of business”. The Soviet Union will be glad to hear that.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    As with most data distributions in life, there are notable exceptions/outliers. You can probably count the number of inefficient governments that “went out of business” in the last 50 years on one hand. You’ll need several people to tabulate the set of corporations that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A’d out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.

bhupy 6y ago

It’s not different, because businesses that are “VERY inefficient” often end up dying. There’s no structural permanence baked into the corporate system that guarantees that a corporation will exist forever. On the other hand, governments and state actors are largely static. The institutions and systems that govern them seldom change. And the larger the polity, the harder it is to build up the political will for democratic institutions to evolve/change. It is very difficult (IMO impossible) for an inefficient government to “go out of business”, so to speak. > There are disadvantages with size and also sometimes advantages such as economy of scale This is absolutely correct, but the market system ensures that whichever corporation becomes large enough to deliver on those economies of scale is selected as a function of their ability to deliver (for the most part). Ask yourself what would happen if we democratically granted Sears a legally authorized monopoly to essentially exist in perpetuity like states and state programs exist today. Would they have been able to efficiently continue delivering value as the world changed? Would we have allowed them to die and be replaced? The fact that they were defeated to the point of bankruptcy by Amazon et al is a feature of the system that is notably lacking in state institutions. In fact, the state institutions that perform the best are the ones that are the smallest/most decentralized: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-podcast-breakingvi/breakingviews-the-exchange-too-small-to-fail-idUSKBN21P3E3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-podcas...

ncallaway 6y ago
> It is very difficult (IMO impossible) for an inefficient government to “go out of business”. The Soviet Union will be glad to hear that.
- bhupy 6y ago
  As with most data distributions in life, there are notable exceptions/outliers. You can probably count the number of inefficient governments that “went out of business” in the last 50 years on one hand. You’ll need several people to tabulate the set of corporations that have gone bankrupt, defunct, or M&A’d out of existence over the same timespan, in the US alone.