7 ms·

Almost all the examples discussed are government or social institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large corporations should be included, and even whol

by dv_dt 3y ago

Almost all the examples discussed are government or social institutions, but it really applies more widely. Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems". If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. In the primary build phase, growth was huge even though the investments and actual tasks required were huge. But as the 50s/60s US Economy, and the 90s/00s China economy filled in with existing systems there is a phase transition. Productivity slows. Even when you have more resources, and more solved problems, more skills available, productivity slows. And IMHO, it directly relates to this inversion of administration vs actual work.

WalterBright 3y ago
The most productive eras corresponded to when the economies were most free market.
- iambateman 3y ago
  This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder if it’s not causal? There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which were marked by almost no growth at all.
  - lazide 3y ago
    There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change. Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology. Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level. If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster. Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. Free markets have always found that potential.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Free markets help, but are not by themselves sufficient. Equalizing that potential is also not always in the interest of many parties. You don’t have to go back very far in history to find plenty of examples. Recent history has had massive and rapid technological development, and it’s been relatively easy to find win/win trades, so it’s easy to think it is. But the Caribbean slave trade, or US Deep South cotton trade, or Indian spice trade? Eh…. A little less clear.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        > Free markets help, but are not by themselves sufficient. Example? > Caribbean slave trade And yet the free market in the US buried them, and the Caribbean remains poor.
        lazide 3y ago
        I don’t think you have the history here. Technological development - decent ships, actually good and reliable navigation, and knowledge of exploitable opportunities (sugar markets, and later cotton). Energy gradient - cheap labor (in the form of slaves) in Africa, cheap arable land (Caribbean, US, South America), hungry markets with excess wealth in Europe. First, the Caribbean got exploited (with open markets!) rather brutally, until the slave rebellions starting in 1790, and further escalating. Haiti in particular, won their rebellion - and then were completely economically isolated (by closing the market!) by the European powers. They still have not recovered economically, same for most of the Caribbean. Around this time is when the US markets (less ideal to exploitation, but larger and more controllable) in both sugar cane and cotton started to take off using the same sources. Which fueled significant tension between the northern states (no crops easily amenable to slavery, rather being capital manufacturing, livestock, and secondary goods like weaving/textiles) and the southern states (many labor intensive crops, amenable to slavery). Attempts at controlling the open markets in these crops by dissimilar interests (by either banning slavery or by blockade) is what led to the civil war. The south couldn’t ban slavery without bankrupting their economy. The north couldn’t allow free trade/slavery continue without making themselves less competitive, as Europe has more developed textile mills and heavy manufacturing. So them getting the goods directly was undercutting northern US competitiveness. Notably, the British, being the first into the Industrial Revolution and the furthest along, were also the first major European power to not just ban slavery in their country - but all their colonies, and everywhere else they could reach. To cut off the ‘energy gradient’ of cheap labor, and make their products (more capital intensive manufacturing) more competitive. The Caribbean is poor because they rebelled against exploitation, but couldn’t capture the economic engine that was exploiting them - they got bypassed by a competitor. And by the time their competitor (US Deep South) also got broken, the underlying energy gradient that led to them being exploited at all was cut off. So all they had left was ruins, debt, and disease. Sucks to be them. So, depending on how you measure ‘good’, they’d have probably been a whole lot better off with a closed market that would never have let the initial energy gradient be formed to begin with, eh? Or at least not allowed the extremely rapid and rapacious exploitation. Think of open markets as a full open floodgate, and closed ones as having a valve at various degrees of closed off. Flooding is very ‘profitable’ if you can somehow harness it (very difficult to do), but can be very unpleasant and destructive for those caught in its path. It’s nearly impossible to die of thirst in a flood. Restrictive flow doesn’t product as much ‘profit’ but has the potential to produce more desirable outcomes if used effectively. As long as the dam doesn’t burst of course. If the valve is misused or turned off, it’s easy for some (or even all) to die of thirst. Pick your poison.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    It's true for the last thousand years at least. A thriving middle class appeared in northwestern Europe a thousand years ago, a middle class of merchants and other businessmen.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Which middle class would that be, in 1024? The merchant princes came later, centuries later in fact. The only that would remotely qualify would be guild organized professions, and even those rose to prominence in the high and latr middle ages.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        If I recall correctly, it was most apparent in the Netherlands with the textile industry. It wasn't princes, it was commoners setting up shops etc.
        hef19898 3y ago
        The funny thing about all those guilds, as those were necessary to create something of a non-peasant class in the cities, is that zhey were absolutely not free market. They fixed prices, limited output, set salaries, limuted the number of workshops. In a sense, they were as much labor union as they were oligopols. What we consider free market came with the industrial revolution and colonialism and the national companies created to exploit those colonies. The first signs of that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse. Those were still subserviant to nobility and aristocratic rule so, while the industrial revolution capitalists and colonial companies were much less so. Fun fact: The workers building cathedrals were fully unionized, with all the benefits that's with that: limited work hours and days, health care, social security.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        The places where the guilds had more power were less prosperous.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    The last two hundred years saw the amount of energy available increase 50X. The US is into free markets because historically it's interests were anti-mercantilist.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      The amount of energy available hasn't changed in a billion years, only the activities of humans has.
      - Gibbon1 3y ago
        Please don't make silly comments like this.
        whatshisface 3y ago
        You don't think the social context in which the energy was made available has anything to do with the fact that the growth occurred?
- t0bia_s 3y ago
  Also when currency was backed by commodity that made limits by sources. With fiat money, there are no limits and companies / governments crippling free market. (or natural resources like environment etc.)
- dimal 3y ago
  Define “free”. Most modern Asian capitalist economies have never been very “free” in the American sense of “free market”. They’ve always been heavily guided by government policy. I think the most productive eras are really when everyone is picking low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit only seems so low because there’s been a burst of newly available mechanical technology. Then everything is picked clean, productivity drops, and the economy shifts to prioritizing useless consumption.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    "The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. One of the central principles of a free market is the concept of voluntary exchange, which is defined as any transaction in which two parties freely trade goods or services." -- google "free market"
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - thefaux 3y ago
      Voluntary is carrying a lot of weight there. Do we voluntarily trade money for bread or freely choose starving as an alternative? What is to prevent those who control the bread from coercively taking every penny you have? A free market without government control is an adolescent fever dream. Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will. The question is not whether there will be government control, it is how much?
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        The purpose of government in a free market is to prevent use of force & fraud in transactions, and to enforce contracts and property rights. > Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will. The free North in the US.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  Doesn't this depend on how you define productive? If GDP is your metric, I think it probably correlates well - despite the fact that the 50s and 60s weren't particularly free market (wage restrictions, high taxes, etc.) when compared to say 1930 after the free market collapsed. But my larger point is that I think "free market" eras also correspond with worse quality of life for the majority of citizens. I'm thinking things like pre-safety-regulations industrialization in the US; the environmental catastrophe that was the 60s (so bad that it led Nixon to create the EPA); the affordable housing catastrophe that has been the past 15 years. We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    "Free Market" here refers to "free from economic rent"
    - fieldcny 3y ago
      That is not a common definition of free market.
      - imtringued 3y ago
        Whenever I hear people talk about free market it is usually not in the sense of economic freedom or free software. So you are correct. It generally refers to free as in free beer aka the government is supposed to subsidize the private sector and average citizens are supposed to pay for it. I'm not talking about socialists here, I'm talking about neoclassical economists and neoliberals in business and politics. Almost nobody wants to pay for the pollution they cause via CO2 taxes. Meanwhile income taxes are considered efficient despite their dead weight loss. Everything is upside down on this planet when it comes to economics.
        scarab92 3y ago
        I’ve literally never heard of someone defining a free market as a market with government subsidies. It’s usually defined as a market free from (excessive) government control. I think you might be trying to shoehorn domestic policy concerns into a broader definition of free markets.
- newsclues 3y ago
  The Soviet Union was very productive in some areas without a free market.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Like what?
    - newsclues 3y ago
      Typically raw materials required by military. They built up a massive industry of mining and processing raw materials like aluminum, titanium and steel. Slave labour can be highly productive.
mc32 3y ago
Private companies, I think, have some limits. Governments can always raise taxes or print more money to sustain their otherwise insolvent organization. In other words they can be wasteful and top heavy without having to periodically pare things down through layoffs. And definitely organizations that teach their initial goals will reinvent themselves to milk more money.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  Monopolies and regulatory capture sustains insolvent organizations.. see Boeing. This really isn't a private enterprise vs govt split. It's the system in place of how decisions get made, how resources are allocated. Our current system of the world has elements split in both private enterprise and gov't that as a system, exhibit Pournelles law. This theory of division between private enterprise and gov't doesn't in practice limit the negative effects - in fact in think we live in a modern world where we should recognize that there are many many examples of this split failing to administer a solution to meet the needs of society & humans.
  - mc32 3y ago
    Boeing can still go bankrupt or become so financially strapped it needs to sell itself off, merge, split, etc. Governments rarely try to become more efficient. By and large they keep adding to their bureaucracies. The ex Gov of Texas was made fun of for saying he’d eliminate parts of the executive and when asked couldn’t even remember which ones, never the less, there is a kernel of a good idea to retrench bureaucracies on a periodic basis -something when younger I’d dismiss out of hand because I though more govt always equals better.
    - dv_dt 3y ago
      Private enterprise in our current system stands in the way of government being more efficient. It's a prime example of administrators (in the form of capitol holders) standing in the way of better functioning. Intuit / Turbo Tax standing in the way of better tax admin. Pharma companies standing in the way of negotiated drug prices for medicare. Power utilities standing in the way of rules allowing distributed power production. The list goes on and on...
dv_dt 3y ago
Addl note on the phase change: administration might also be thought of as capital ownership in a economic or capitalist context where an inefficiency is protection or "administration" of large pools of existing wealth and profits becoming more important than the continued building of the creation of value and identification and solving of social problems through economic activity.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  In particular, this would be capital ownership by independent investors who are only interested in abstractly making money and not being personally involved in business operations, and then hire managers afflicted with the principal-agent problem to handle the details.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    Individual investors are actually pretty disenfranchised compared to concentration of financial parties like institutional investors and private equity. This those more collected interests which are happy to install a Professional Managerial Class that are only interested in the abstract financials and ignore principal agent mismanagement of long term interests. But concentrated fictionalization agents and PMC they appoint preserve their control above their ability to manage healthy growth. And our system is unable to check them.
wnevets 3y ago
> Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems". For example Davita actively lobbies their patients not to get transplants [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_nqzVfxFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_nqzVfxFQ
ajross 3y ago
> If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. I really don't think that's correct. In fact GDP per capita was historically flat in most of the world, even through the early parts of the industrial revolution. It took off like a rocket only after WW2 in the pax americana era. I think that's an interesting argument to have, but I'm not going to believe that statement for an instant without numbers.
tsimionescu 3y ago
I agree with you that this law applies to any large organization. But I disagree with the idea that the 50s/60s represent the end of an "early on" era of the US economy. Many large US corporations were already decades old the time WW2 started - John Deere was founded in 1843, GE in 1892, Castrol in 1899, Texaco in 1902, Ford in 1903, Chevrolet and IBM (under a different name) in 1911, Boeing in 1916. The biggest boom in the US economy happened during and just after the war, when much of the giants of today (except big tech, of course) were 30+ years old companies (and there were many . I don't think bureaucracy was the problem with any slowdown, or if it was, it wasn't as inevitable as the law suggests.

by dv_dt 3y ago

WalterBright 3y ago

The most productive eras corresponded to when the economies were most free market.

iambateman 3y ago
This is apparently true of the past 200 years, but I wonder if it’s not causal? There were millennia of unbelievably open markets which were marked by almost no growth at all.
- lazide 3y ago
  There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. And there has to be shifts either in that potential, or in the machinery that uses it for change. Think of it like a potential gradient, or a gravity well, or a food source in biology. Open markets where markets have been open for awhile (and no new game changing things like new technology, new ideology, etc. have happened) will maintain homeostasis at that level. If new technology gets introduced, unless there is strong closed market forces to keep it from spreading, then you’ll have change (in this case growth) faster with open markets. It will equalize the potential faster. Which, depending on who you are, may be desirable or not.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > There has to be unrealized economical potential for growth. Free markets have always found that potential.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Free markets help, but are not by themselves sufficient. Equalizing that potential is also not always in the interest of many parties. You don’t have to go back very far in history to find plenty of examples. Recent history has had massive and rapid technological development, and it’s been relatively easy to find win/win trades, so it’s easy to think it is. But the Caribbean slave trade, or US Deep South cotton trade, or Indian spice trade? Eh…. A little less clear.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        > Free markets help, but are not by themselves sufficient. Example? > Caribbean slave trade And yet the free market in the US buried them, and the Caribbean remains poor.
        lazide 3y ago
        I don’t think you have the history here. Technological development - decent ships, actually good and reliable navigation, and knowledge of exploitable opportunities (sugar markets, and later cotton). Energy gradient - cheap labor (in the form of slaves) in Africa, cheap arable land (Caribbean, US, South America), hungry markets with excess wealth in Europe. First, the Caribbean got exploited (with open markets!) rather brutally, until the slave rebellions starting in 1790, and further escalating. Haiti in particular, won their rebellion - and then were completely economically isolated (by closing the market!) by the European powers. They still have not recovered economically, same for most of the Caribbean. Around this time is when the US markets (less ideal to exploitation, but larger and more controllable) in both sugar cane and cotton started to take off using the same sources. Which fueled significant tension between the northern states (no crops easily amenable to slavery, rather being capital manufacturing, livestock, and secondary goods like weaving/textiles) and the southern states (many labor intensive crops, amenable to slavery). Attempts at controlling the open markets in these crops by dissimilar interests (by either banning slavery or by blockade) is what led to the civil war. The south couldn’t ban slavery without bankrupting their economy. The north couldn’t allow free trade/slavery continue without making themselves less competitive, as Europe has more developed textile mills and heavy manufacturing. So them getting the goods directly was undercutting northern US competitiveness. Notably, the British, being the first into the Industrial Revolution and the furthest along, were also the first major European power to not just ban slavery in their country - but all their colonies, and everywhere else they could reach. To cut off the ‘energy gradient’ of cheap labor, and make their products (more capital intensive manufacturing) more competitive. The Caribbean is poor because they rebelled against exploitation, but couldn’t capture the economic engine that was exploiting them - they got bypassed by a competitor. And by the time their competitor (US Deep South) also got broken, the underlying energy gradient that led to them being exploited at all was cut off. So all they had left was ruins, debt, and disease. Sucks to be them. So, depending on how you measure ‘good’, they’d have probably been a whole lot better off with a closed market that would never have let the initial energy gradient be formed to begin with, eh? Or at least not allowed the extremely rapid and rapacious exploitation. Think of open markets as a full open floodgate, and closed ones as having a valve at various degrees of closed off. Flooding is very ‘profitable’ if you can somehow harness it (very difficult to do), but can be very unpleasant and destructive for those caught in its path. It’s nearly impossible to die of thirst in a flood. Restrictive flow doesn’t product as much ‘profit’ but has the potential to produce more desirable outcomes if used effectively. As long as the dam doesn’t burst of course. If the valve is misused or turned off, it’s easy for some (or even all) to die of thirst. Pick your poison.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  It's true for the last thousand years at least. A thriving middle class appeared in northwestern Europe a thousand years ago, a middle class of merchants and other businessmen.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Which middle class would that be, in 1024? The merchant princes came later, centuries later in fact. The only that would remotely qualify would be guild organized professions, and even those rose to prominence in the high and latr middle ages.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      If I recall correctly, it was most apparent in the Netherlands with the textile industry. It wasn't princes, it was commoners setting up shops etc.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        The funny thing about all those guilds, as those were necessary to create something of a non-peasant class in the cities, is that zhey were absolutely not free market. They fixed prices, limited output, set salaries, limuted the number of workshops. In a sense, they were as much labor union as they were oligopols. What we consider free market came with the industrial revolution and colonialism and the national companies created to exploit those colonies. The first signs of that can be traced to the early renessaince era, with Italian merchant princes, the Fugger and the Hanse. Those were still subserviant to nobility and aristocratic rule so, while the industrial revolution capitalists and colonial companies were much less so. Fun fact: The workers building cathedrals were fully unionized, with all the benefits that's with that: limited work hours and days, health care, social security.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        The places where the guilds had more power were less prosperous.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  The last two hundred years saw the amount of energy available increase 50X. The US is into free markets because historically it's interests were anti-mercantilist.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    The amount of energy available hasn't changed in a billion years, only the activities of humans has.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      Please don't make silly comments like this.
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        You don't think the social context in which the energy was made available has anything to do with the fact that the growth occurred?
t0bia_s 3y ago
Also when currency was backed by commodity that made limits by sources. With fiat money, there are no limits and companies / governments crippling free market. (or natural resources like environment etc.)
dimal 3y ago
Define “free”. Most modern Asian capitalist economies have never been very “free” in the American sense of “free market”. They’ve always been heavily guided by government policy. I think the most productive eras are really when everyone is picking low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit only seems so low because there’s been a burst of newly available mechanical technology. Then everything is picked clean, productivity drops, and the economy shifts to prioritizing useless consumption.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  "The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. One of the central principles of a free market is the concept of voluntary exchange, which is defined as any transaction in which two parties freely trade goods or services." -- google "free market"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thefaux 3y ago
    Voluntary is carrying a lot of weight there. Do we voluntarily trade money for bread or freely choose starving as an alternative? What is to prevent those who control the bread from coercively taking every penny you have? A free market without government control is an adolescent fever dream. Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will. The question is not whether there will be government control, it is how much?
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      The purpose of government in a free market is to prevent use of force & fraud in transactions, and to enforce contracts and property rights. > Nothing like it has ever existed or ever will. The free North in the US.
edmundsauto 3y ago
Doesn't this depend on how you define productive? If GDP is your metric, I think it probably correlates well - despite the fact that the 50s and 60s weren't particularly free market (wage restrictions, high taxes, etc.) when compared to say 1930 after the free market collapsed. But my larger point is that I think "free market" eras also correspond with worse quality of life for the majority of citizens. I'm thinking things like pre-safety-regulations industrialization in the US; the environmental catastrophe that was the 60s (so bad that it led Nixon to create the EPA); the affordable housing catastrophe that has been the past 15 years. We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  "Free Market" here refers to "free from economic rent"
  - fieldcny 3y ago
    That is not a common definition of free market.
    - imtringued 3y ago
      Whenever I hear people talk about free market it is usually not in the sense of economic freedom or free software. So you are correct. It generally refers to free as in free beer aka the government is supposed to subsidize the private sector and average citizens are supposed to pay for it. I'm not talking about socialists here, I'm talking about neoclassical economists and neoliberals in business and politics. Almost nobody wants to pay for the pollution they cause via CO2 taxes. Meanwhile income taxes are considered efficient despite their dead weight loss. Everything is upside down on this planet when it comes to economics.
      - scarab92 3y ago
        I’ve literally never heard of someone defining a free market as a market with government subsidies. It’s usually defined as a market free from (excessive) government control. I think you might be trying to shoehorn domestic policy concerns into a broader definition of free markets.
newsclues 3y ago
The Soviet Union was very productive in some areas without a free market.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Like what?
  - newsclues 3y ago
    Typically raw materials required by military. They built up a massive industry of mining and processing raw materials like aluminum, titanium and steel. Slave labour can be highly productive.

mc32 3y ago

Private companies, I think, have some limits. Governments can always raise taxes or print more money to sustain their otherwise insolvent organization. In other words they can be wasteful and top heavy without having to periodically pare things down through layoffs. And definitely organizations that teach their initial goals will reinvent themselves to milk more money.

dv_dt 3y ago
Monopolies and regulatory capture sustains insolvent organizations.. see Boeing. This really isn't a private enterprise vs govt split. It's the system in place of how decisions get made, how resources are allocated. Our current system of the world has elements split in both private enterprise and gov't that as a system, exhibit Pournelles law. This theory of division between private enterprise and gov't doesn't in practice limit the negative effects - in fact in think we live in a modern world where we should recognize that there are many many examples of this split failing to administer a solution to meet the needs of society & humans.
- mc32 3y ago
  Boeing can still go bankrupt or become so financially strapped it needs to sell itself off, merge, split, etc. Governments rarely try to become more efficient. By and large they keep adding to their bureaucracies. The ex Gov of Texas was made fun of for saying he’d eliminate parts of the executive and when asked couldn’t even remember which ones, never the less, there is a kernel of a good idea to retrench bureaucracies on a periodic basis -something when younger I’d dismiss out of hand because I though more govt always equals better.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    Private enterprise in our current system stands in the way of government being more efficient. It's a prime example of administrators (in the form of capitol holders) standing in the way of better functioning. Intuit / Turbo Tax standing in the way of better tax admin. Pharma companies standing in the way of negotiated drug prices for medicare. Power utilities standing in the way of rules allowing distributed power production. The list goes on and on...

dv_dt 3y ago

Addl note on the phase change: administration might also be thought of as capital ownership in a economic or capitalist context where an inefficiency is protection or "administration" of large pools of existing wealth and profits becoming more important than the continued building of the creation of value and identification and solving of social problems through economic activity.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
In particular, this would be capital ownership by independent investors who are only interested in abstractly making money and not being personally involved in business operations, and then hire managers afflicted with the principal-agent problem to handle the details.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  Individual investors are actually pretty disenfranchised compared to concentration of financial parties like institutional investors and private equity. This those more collected interests which are happy to install a Professional Managerial Class that are only interested in the abstract financials and ignore principal agent mismanagement of long term interests. But concentrated fictionalization agents and PMC they appoint preserve their control above their ability to manage healthy growth. And our system is unable to check them.

wnevets 3y ago

> Large corporations should be included, and even whole economies. A more general word instead might be "systems". For example Davita actively lobbies their patients not to get transplants [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_nqzVfxFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_nqzVfxFQ

ajross 3y ago

> If you look at the historic prime growth and productivity eras of national economies of the US and China, some of the most productive eras were early on when large scale systems (corporations, institutions, etc) simply didn't exist. I really don't think that's correct. In fact GDP per capita was historically flat in most of the world, even through the early parts of the industrial revolution. It took off like a rocket only after WW2 in the pax americana era. I think that's an interesting argument to have, but I'm not going to believe that statement for an instant without numbers.

tsimionescu 3y ago

I agree with you that this law applies to any large organization. But I disagree with the idea that the 50s/60s represent the end of an "early on" era of the US economy. Many large US corporations were already decades old the time WW2 started - John Deere was founded in 1843, GE in 1892, Castrol in 1899, Texaco in 1902, Ford in 1903, Chevrolet and IBM (under a different name) in 1911, Boeing in 1916. The biggest boom in the US economy happened during and just after the war, when much of the giants of today (except big tech, of course) were 30+ years old companies (and there were many . I don't think bureaucracy was the problem with any slowdown, or if it was, it wasn't as inevitable as the law suggests.