That sounds plausible on the face of it, but when I went looking for counterexamples they weren't hard to come by. Supermarkets, big box stores like Walmart, an

That sounds plausible on the face of it, but when I went looking for counterexamples they weren't hard to come by. Supermarkets, big box stores like Walmart, and online retail giants like Amazon all run centrally-managed logistics operations of staggering scale, and they do such a solid job that people hardly ever think about it. Airline companies suffer from weather issues and operational hiccups, but still manage to transport huge numbers of people all around the world, quickly, while surviving on slim profit margins. America has a lot of giant factories that actually do manage to have high manufacturing throughput. All of these are centralized, and all demonstrate truly impressive amounts of competence. (One thing these companies all have in common is that they have competitors and need to cater to their customers and shareholders. If they were poorly run, their customers would go somewhere else. Amtrak gets federal funding whether they're well run or not. This is probably a factor, though probably not the only factor.)