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I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperativ
by antipurist 4mo ago
I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.
I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.
Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.
This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.
Can this work? No idea.
- voakbasda 4mo agoDon’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels. Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- MathMonkeyMan 4mo agoI haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism. The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
- jleyank 4mo agoGreek city states and German petty kingdoms suggest conflict and failure to unite vs external threats common.
- interludead 4mo agoThe more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around
- jimbokun 4mo agoProbably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.
- andyferris 4mo agoOne problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad. Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass. I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.
- perilunar 4mo ago> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.
- maxerickson 4mo agoIn the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments. In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units). Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.
- LordGronk 4mo agoIt’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.
- perilunar 4mo agoBut local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.
- perilunar 4mo ago> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up... Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels. I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.
- wolvesechoes 4mo agoReminder that Greeks were right and representative democracy is not democracy at all, but another form of oligarchy.
- Nasrudith 4mo agoThat is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly. We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.
- EA-3167 4mo agoRationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise. Edit spelling
- jimbokun 4mo agoAlso an unwillingness to examine their own irrational biases, seeing them only in other people.
- weakfish 4mo agoSomeone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoIt can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture. Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US. It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive. Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then. So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey. "Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that. If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
- interludead 4mo ago[dead]
- rexpop 4mo ago"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.
- jimbokun 4mo agoThe only mechanism like that I’m aware of is the market, but a large organization shields smaller teams and individuals from being measured by it.
- YZF 4mo agoWant to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.
- jimbokun 4mo agoYeah a lot of management isn’t just a desire for power and control over others, but just the unglamorous and boring work of tracking what everyone is working on and how it fits into the bigger picture. In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization.
- lowercased 4mo ago"In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization." ... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices. Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.
- rcxdude 4mo agoMaybe, there is an aspect of things being deliberately kept hidden, but also communicating this stuff is just pretty hard. Large organizations often spend huge amounts of effort on it and still get things wrong.
- jimbokun 4mo agoYes, good management is rare. I believe companies where ICs understand how their role ties into the overall success of the company will outperform other companies on average.
- jimbokun 4mo agoLike hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever. Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.
- fakedang 4mo agoReminds me of Medvedev and Putin.
- aleqs 4mo agoI believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.
- baddash 4mo agoLook into Haier's RenDanHeYi philosophy. One of my ambitions is to adopt that model when I start a company, and I think it is awesome and the future. BTW, seems like we think similarly regarding this. Wanna exchange contact info? my email is mclaren212@gmail.com if you're interested in connecting
- wahern 4mo agoThat's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.