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We have to remember that when we talking about giant companies we are talking about giant institutions, of a form and culture that has not existed in human hist
by netcan 12y ago
We have to remember that when we talking about giant companies we are talking about giant institutions, of a form and culture that has not existed in human history. The closest parallels common throughout human history are armies.
I think that our 20th century paradigms have failed to understand and shape these institutions, each with their own trappings. Labour unionism, which was deeply rooted in man labour cultures and many countries' political systems was amazingly corrupt. They became their own institutions layering their own dynamics and interests into the already impossible mesh. The results were far from unanimously positive.
Liberal-capitalism nurtured the concept of non natural person, corporate entities. The cultural relationship between individual, employers, consumers and investors and the institutions is grafted onto the idea that the institution is a legal person. At this point, companies are far more than risk sharing and limiting devices. They are institutions of the same gravity as churches, bureaucracies, aristocracies and such. They are entrenched. I don't mean that in a strictly accusatory sense. They are just part of the web of culture, laws, economies and everything else.
First of all, we all need to have the humility to understand how little we know about how these things work. We are designed to operate within social institutions, not to build and destroy them each generation. No one built feudalism or poleis. No one really designed the international system of nation states. No one created Danish national identity. These things just evolved. Those are the kinds of things we're dealing with.
I don't know what is the right way of dealing with Amazon, Google or Walmart as a (global) society. I think I would be more comfortable if the times brought around a period of miniaturization, where these mega institutions gave way to hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.
For Amazon, what's keeping them huge is (a) dispatch & postal delivery is surprisingly hard. (b) The chain between design, manufacture, marketing and delivery is surprisingly cumbersome. Amazon is a company that does what a market would do in a world fewer impediments.
Maybe the next few decades will make global delivery trivial. This would enable products to come directly from suppliers and simplify the chain. Software developers once had to sell software through software stores. The modern incarnations of software store is a relatively thinner layer. Producers are closer to consumers and the intermediaries are really just market makers.
PS: Price controls have a bad track record dating back to Roman times.
- davidw 12y ago> For Amazon, what's keeping them huge is ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
- emotionalcode 12y agoEvolution of human culture can either be recognized as a consciously directed emergent property or it can be consciously ignored and instead directed by the unification of unspoken (but existent) belief systems of the majority. Cultural evolution isn't magic. There are properties that can be recognized for what they are and what role they play in the development of culture. I think it is disingenuous to point out the size of institution versus the capability of the mind to analyze and distill what goes on. The law is supposed to be blind. That means to me, the law should be sound on its own ground, without being dependent on rhetorical arguments that paint possibly sneaky incentives over as abstract 'biological cultural sociological imperatives'. I think for the nature of this argument, understanding the broad picture is complicated and takes time, caution, and care, neither of which can be established through armchair analysis. Implementation is different than theory.
- netcan 12y agoI disagree. I don't think "human culture can be (honestly) recognized as a consciously directed emergent property," any more than an individuals personality can be directed. We know some things. We control some things. We can't engineer a human personality. Same goes for human culture. We can't decide to model Iraqi culture on Italian culture. We can copy some institutions, the copying is indirect. The cards will fall where they may, and the honest truth is that we don't know how it works. Before the fact we have a bunch of angry amadons screaming that xyz will happen if we do xyz. After the fact we have the amadons arguing about what really happened. No knowledge is gained.
- emotionalcode 12y agoNo, I am saying that the collective unconscious belief system of a system itself (here, I am calling a collection of humans, or a society - to be a system) is what can direct it. This means all those side thoughts you think you ignore. When you choose to listen to analysis over intuition, but you might not consider the effect of ignoring intuition in favor of analysis, or you may even deny the existence of intuition because analysis exists. Intuition can be uniform across a population and can direct the population. I am not trying to be Freudian here, unconscious is just a word for 'thoughts you keep to yourself'. It's all the thoughts and actions that we take that we don't tell one another about, things we may not even be aware that we are doing (like independent thinking, thinking about what other people are thinking), that can create direction within a social system. I am not saying "engineer a human personality". I am saying "engineer yourself", and consider what that means across a collection of people when they are all engineering themselves, and happen to mutually, mentally agree on some things, but do not express this directly to one another.