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Not necessarily disagreeing, leadership should certainly try to get feedback from those on the lines, but from everything I’ve heard, law firms are intensely po

by ericd 4y ago

Not necessarily disagreeing, leadership should certainly try to get feedback from those on the lines, but from everything I’ve heard, law firms are intensely political, more so than your average corporation. I’d be curious to hear more about how it plays out in German companies, but it seems like distributing power might broaden those power struggles and might draw away from the ability of the company to focus and adjust quickly. There’s a reason that in wartime, the Roman Republic would (temporarily) become a dictatorship by handing power to the Consuls. Companies that don’t have market dominance are essentially in a state of war and need the ability to be nimble, including firing large portions of their staff to reallocate their resources when needed, it’s only the sleepy giants with heavily entrenched power that can afford to relax and focus on spreading the spoils of rent seeking to all interested parties, and even they can only do it for so long until a disruptor comes and tries to break them, somehow. I don’t think we should seek to require that employment be more stable, because down that route lies moribund companies and an ossified economy, and at some point, that can no longer sustain the standard of living that Westerners are accustomed to, because companies in places that don’t have that will eat their lunch. I think we should just seek to make the penalties of not being employed less severe, with much improved social safety nets. Let people continue to compete hard, let them continue to associate and dissociate freely, but don’t let the penalty for dissociation be financial ruin for employees. If we achieve that, we’ll likely make the economy more dynamic, as risk taking is no longer so personally risky - it would give everyone the ability to operate from a place of security and rationality rather than fear and anxiety (from “a position of fuck you”, if you’ve seen that clip from The Gambler) and do what they should do rather than just trying to tread water.

cormacrelf 4y ago
My answer to that is basically that these are the same things people say about autocracies vs democracies and it doesn’t really play out that way in practice. The argument goes that autocracies have a big advantage in agility through top down control. But somehow when you mobilise them for wars, democracies are much better at it. Somehow they keep winning, but only when the citizens agree with the aims of leadership. The huge information flow in an open society producing better analysis and better technology, and the enablement of distributed effort through distributed power, amounts to a better machine. Even if democracies have a tendency to become more centralised in wartime, because to some extent there is an optimal balance for each scenario like you say. But the underlying forces of democracy stick around, and leaders still act in a way that’s constrained by it lest they get thrown out. Modern democratic wartime politics is not much like the Consuls at all. Back to companies, if you can find a goal that your employees support, then they will similarly be a better machine at working towards that goal. If your response to challenges as a company is to shut out your employees and tell them to obey, you are missing out on this machine’s power. The only reason you would want to miss out on that power is if you had no other choice, because you were unable to frame the challenge in a way the employees can respond positively to. Democracies have a way of correcting that (among other things), which is called getting voted out; companies don’t by default, so at best you’re usually running a shitty version of democracy and yeah, bad democracies sometimes perform pretty poorly.
- ericd 4y ago
  Thanks for the well thought-out response. Good point, if you can get people to feel real ownership of the company, that’s extremely powerful (I’ve experienced that in my own small company, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in a large company, maybe somewhat at Apple under Jobs). I think my main argument is to not mandate structure with law, I’ve seen a number of people calling for that. I think that if we strengthened social safety nets, this sort of thing would become more common, as people became more free to leave workplaces they didn’t feel invested in, and more companies would try to foster it to attract employees.
  - cormacrelf 4y ago
    If it’s a better strategy then companies that do adopt it will out-compete those that don’t. Social safety nets are a fine idea generally but I don’t think they would specifically encourage this practice. You don’t really want people feeling free to leave the workforce entirely. (This is an unpopular conclusion of capitalism but if nobody has to work then nothing happens and then nobody gets to eat.) The better structure is for people to be able to move to better places that make them feel empowered and rewarded etc. Safety nets are useful in that people can try things and fail, which is another desirable quality in a society, but I don’t think you can rely on them to make employers improve their offerings. A pretty huge issue in modern capitalist economies is that people are locked into underpaid jobs with no prospects and no investment in their future other than to hold on for dear life. That’s a massive waste of our potential and a terrible experience for those workers. (And because failing these people is part of the complex of interconnected root causes that lead to anti-democratic sentiment, it is an existential problem.) You want companies to compete to use people better than that, and sharing in the rewards and the decision-making makes for a much better plight for a worker at the lower end of the pay scale. Heck, there are companies today that pay everyone the same salary, determined by the company’s profit divided by N. Their people post on HN sometimes.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      The great thing about the free market in America is you can create a company and run it as you please. If you're more successful, other corporations will copy it.
steve_gh 4y ago
Small error: in the Roman Republic, the dictatorship took power away from the consuls (with short term limits - normally 6 months), who were the normal leadership. And one of the things that republican dictators prided themselves on, was the speed at which they resolved the urgent issues and handed power back to the consuls, often in weeks if not days. Of course, this all went to pot at the end of the Republic when the rival warlords from Sulla through to Octavian saw the dictatorship as a means of taking control of Rome, so had extended periods of dictatorship "the problems are so vast I need to be dictator for 10 years".
- ericd 4y ago
  Whoops, you're right, thanks! It's been a while since I listened through Mike Duncan's The History of Rome :-) Looks like the consuls nominated a dictator. Was the dictator ever a self-nominated consul?

by ericd 4y ago

cormacrelf 4y ago

My answer to that is basically that these are the same things people say about autocracies vs democracies and it doesn’t really play out that way in practice. The argument goes that autocracies have a big advantage in agility through top down control. But somehow when you mobilise them for wars, democracies are much better at it. Somehow they keep winning, but only when the citizens agree with the aims of leadership. The huge information flow in an open society producing better analysis and better technology, and the enablement of distributed effort through distributed power, amounts to a better machine. Even if democracies have a tendency to become more centralised in wartime, because to some extent there is an optimal balance for each scenario like you say. But the underlying forces of democracy stick around, and leaders still act in a way that’s constrained by it lest they get thrown out. Modern democratic wartime politics is not much like the Consuls at all. Back to companies, if you can find a goal that your employees support, then they will similarly be a better machine at working towards that goal. If your response to challenges as a company is to shut out your employees and tell them to obey, you are missing out on this machine’s power. The only reason you would want to miss out on that power is if you had no other choice, because you were unable to frame the challenge in a way the employees can respond positively to. Democracies have a way of correcting that (among other things), which is called getting voted out; companies don’t by default, so at best you’re usually running a shitty version of democracy and yeah, bad democracies sometimes perform pretty poorly.

ericd 4y ago
Thanks for the well thought-out response. Good point, if you can get people to feel real ownership of the company, that’s extremely powerful (I’ve experienced that in my own small company, but I don’t think I’ve seen it in a large company, maybe somewhat at Apple under Jobs). I think my main argument is to not mandate structure with law, I’ve seen a number of people calling for that. I think that if we strengthened social safety nets, this sort of thing would become more common, as people became more free to leave workplaces they didn’t feel invested in, and more companies would try to foster it to attract employees.
- cormacrelf 4y ago
  If it’s a better strategy then companies that do adopt it will out-compete those that don’t. Social safety nets are a fine idea generally but I don’t think they would specifically encourage this practice. You don’t really want people feeling free to leave the workforce entirely. (This is an unpopular conclusion of capitalism but if nobody has to work then nothing happens and then nobody gets to eat.) The better structure is for people to be able to move to better places that make them feel empowered and rewarded etc. Safety nets are useful in that people can try things and fail, which is another desirable quality in a society, but I don’t think you can rely on them to make employers improve their offerings. A pretty huge issue in modern capitalist economies is that people are locked into underpaid jobs with no prospects and no investment in their future other than to hold on for dear life. That’s a massive waste of our potential and a terrible experience for those workers. (And because failing these people is part of the complex of interconnected root causes that lead to anti-democratic sentiment, it is an existential problem.) You want companies to compete to use people better than that, and sharing in the rewards and the decision-making makes for a much better plight for a worker at the lower end of the pay scale. Heck, there are companies today that pay everyone the same salary, determined by the company’s profit divided by N. Their people post on HN sometimes.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The great thing about the free market in America is you can create a company and run it as you please. If you're more successful, other corporations will copy it.

steve_gh 4y ago

Small error: in the Roman Republic, the dictatorship took power away from the consuls (with short term limits - normally 6 months), who were the normal leadership. And one of the things that republican dictators prided themselves on, was the speed at which they resolved the urgent issues and handed power back to the consuls, often in weeks if not days. Of course, this all went to pot at the end of the Republic when the rival warlords from Sulla through to Octavian saw the dictatorship as a means of taking control of Rome, so had extended periods of dictatorship "the problems are so vast I need to be dictator for 10 years".

ericd 4y ago
Whoops, you're right, thanks! It's been a while since I listened through Mike Duncan's The History of Rome :-) Looks like the consuls nominated a dictator. Was the dictator ever a self-nominated consul?