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> Also, the metric that you failed to consider (other than profit/price) is market share. In an economy where almost all companies are hierarchical capitalist

> Also, the metric that you failed to consider (other than profit/price) is market share. In an economy where almost all companies are hierarchical capitalist corporations, most of the market share is going to be owned by these corporation regardless of how successful a few alternative models are. This is by simple statistics and the regression to the mean. On top of that, in the current capitalist economy wealth naturally accumulates on a handful of companies (this is also a natural statistical phenomenon) and in the absence anti-trust and monopoly enforcement the biggest companies have an easier time driving any corporation out having a chance to out-compete them. This is also regardless of company structure. Market share is not a good metric to evaluate efficiency for this reason. There are simply too many unrelated dynamics affecting the who will become market dominant.

gruez 5y ago
>In an economy where almost all companies are hierarchical capitalist corporations, most of the market share is going to be owned by these corporation regardless of how successful a few alternative models are. This is by simple statistics and the regression to the mean. But surely there would be at least one or two industries where coops rein supreme? If 5% of companies were coop, you'd at least expect 5% of leaders to be coop, or they control 5% of the market share. >On top of that, in the current capitalist economy wealth naturally accumulates on a handful of companies (this is also a natural statistical phenomenon) and in the absence anti-trust and monopoly enforcement the biggest companies have an easier time driving any corporation out having a chance to out-compete them. This is also regardless of company structure. why can't coops do the same? consolidate, gain economies of scale, making all of their members better off?
- runarberg 5y ago
  > If 5% of companies were coop, you'd at least expect 5% of leaders to be coop, or they control 5% of the market share. This not how hegemony works in statistics. If you have 10.000 companies and 9.500 are capitalist hierarchical corporations, all else being equal, if you take the top 300 companies by profit (assuming profit is not uniformly distributed), the chances of the sample of 300 having the same distribution as the total 10.000 is very slim. Think about it this way: Take two normal curves. Align them so that they have the same mean and variance. Now shrink one of them so that it is only 5% of mass of the other. Now go to the right extreme of the unmodified curve (say 2 standard deviations where 2.3% of the unmodified samples are), do you think you’ll get the same proportion of the smaller curve or do you think it will be much smaller? > why can't coops do the same? consolidate, gain economies of scale, making all of their members better off? Now this is a more interesting question. The answer is not statistical but sociological, because statistically accumulation of wealth happens regardless of the system, and would happen also if most corporations were worker owned (I believe I even stated it above). However this question is also a bit of a distraction since the claim here is that market share is a poor metric to evaluate efficiency. And whether wealth accumulates in a primerly socialist economy like it does in a capitalist one takes nothing from that claim. A worker owned monopoly earning most of the profit can afford to be just as inefficient as a company earning it’s shareholders the pretty buck.

gruez 5y ago

>In an economy where almost all companies are hierarchical capitalist corporations, most of the market share is going to be owned by these corporation regardless of how successful a few alternative models are. This is by simple statistics and the regression to the mean. But surely there would be at least one or two industries where coops rein supreme? If 5% of companies were coop, you'd at least expect 5% of leaders to be coop, or they control 5% of the market share. >On top of that, in the current capitalist economy wealth naturally accumulates on a handful of companies (this is also a natural statistical phenomenon) and in the absence anti-trust and monopoly enforcement the biggest companies have an easier time driving any corporation out having a chance to out-compete them. This is also regardless of company structure. why can't coops do the same? consolidate, gain economies of scale, making all of their members better off?

runarberg 5y ago
> If 5% of companies were coop, you'd at least expect 5% of leaders to be coop, or they control 5% of the market share. This not how hegemony works in statistics. If you have 10.000 companies and 9.500 are capitalist hierarchical corporations, all else being equal, if you take the top 300 companies by profit (assuming profit is not uniformly distributed), the chances of the sample of 300 having the same distribution as the total 10.000 is very slim. Think about it this way: Take two normal curves. Align them so that they have the same mean and variance. Now shrink one of them so that it is only 5% of mass of the other. Now go to the right extreme of the unmodified curve (say 2 standard deviations where 2.3% of the unmodified samples are), do you think you’ll get the same proportion of the smaller curve or do you think it will be much smaller? > why can't coops do the same? consolidate, gain economies of scale, making all of their members better off? Now this is a more interesting question. The answer is not statistical but sociological, because statistically accumulation of wealth happens regardless of the system, and would happen also if most corporations were worker owned (I believe I even stated it above). However this question is also a bit of a distraction since the claim here is that market share is a poor metric to evaluate efficiency. And whether wealth accumulates in a primerly socialist economy like it does in a capitalist one takes nothing from that claim. A worker owned monopoly earning most of the profit can afford to be just as inefficient as a company earning it’s shareholders the pretty buck.