5 ms·

The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but t

The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- but there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build? Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle... Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have generational creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That is generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines. The generational cultural poverty, coupled with actual material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.

tptacek 14y ago
The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement. The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.
    - toomuchtodo 14y ago
      I agree very much with your post.
- ryanklee 14y ago
  It'd be interesting to note whether the rise is accelerating or decelerating, whether it's growing in sufficient proportion to the number of Americans entering the workforce, etc. Just because the share is rising doesn't mean those enterprises aren't becoming less viable or accommodating. I'm not saying they are or aren't, only that that data is pertinent.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
tempaccount9473 14y ago
> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed. Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Nor mine, not in the short term. Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed. The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe. Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many). Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades. In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint. So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.
tbrownaw 14y ago
The Corporate System is actually collapsing. No, corporations are actually getting more powerful. they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. They're as efficient as they've ever been. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) No, we don't have human-level AI yet. Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.

tptacek 14y ago

The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.

enraged_camel 14y ago
More like it will get upvoted because it starts out with a bombastic statement. The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
toomuchtodo 14y ago
My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
- tptacek 14y ago
  It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    I agree very much with your post.
ryanklee 14y ago
It'd be interesting to note whether the rise is accelerating or decelerating, whether it's growing in sufficient proportion to the number of Americans entering the workforce, etc. Just because the share is rising doesn't mean those enterprises aren't becoming less viable or accommodating. I'm not saying they are or aren't, only that that data is pertinent.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

tempaccount9473 14y ago

> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed. Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Nor mine, not in the short term. Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed. The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe. Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many). Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades. In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint. So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.

tbrownaw 14y ago

The Corporate System is actually collapsing. No, corporations are actually getting more powerful. they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. They're as efficient as they've ever been. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) No, we don't have human-level AI yet. Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.