Comment by grues-dinner
2 months ago
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising.
While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed".
And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of whales, but instead full of a much larger number of a broader mix of smaller fish, what would advertising look like then?
For example, large categories of industry would have to change hugely into cooperative non-owning groups of smaller companies. Would they still have the same advertising dominance, or would the churn within the groups break things up?
I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.
But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.
Sure it's just a thought experiment.
But even in the strict context of the experiment for very heavy industry, like a steel mill or chip fab, they could be co-operatively owned in whole or by parts.
You could also extend the experiment to allow capital assets to be discounted, or allow worker-owned shares to be discounted. So you can get big, but only by building or by sharing, respectively.
Obviously the big industries today would not be possible as they are structured. But what would we get instead? Would the co-operative overhead kill efficiency dead, or would the dynamism in the system produce higher overall efficiency and better worker outcomes than behemoths hoarding resources and hoovering up competition? And if no one can be worth over 100 million (say), what would that do to the lobbying and deal-making system at the higher levels? One 10-billionaire would have be be replaced by 100 people.
> But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable
So you get the main company with salaries from $1m-10m, they subcontract their operations to a company with salaries of $100k-1m which manage the cleaning contracts, and the people doing the work are just gig workers on less than $10 an hour.
But the main company doesn't have the CEO:worker imbalance
I like the direction but some things are difficult to imagine happening at all without extremely large companies.
I have wondered before about restricting a company’s diversity. Effectively giving a time limit after a company over a certain size develops a new line of business by which it must be spun off into a new company. Say 12 or 18 months.
For example, Apple would have been allowed to develop and launch Apple Music but it would have been forced to spin it off.
The rule would need to be carefully crafted, and would need regulators to be active in enforcement as it would require interpretation to be applied (similar to how anti-trust works today, perhaps).
Is it really that hard to imagine "large companies not diversifying"?
Large companies diversifying is the unnatural thing. Why on earth should Apple do music, or Amazon do video? It's manipulating their monopoly positions, it's almost inherently anti-competitive, etc.
Just because antitrust in the US at least is so wimpy (exclusively looking for "consumer harm") there's no reason sane antitrust couldn't also protect ... competition itself, in the form of smaller players etc.
I don't think there's a single industry that merits the bloated conglomerates that rule the earth today, whether it's mining, autos, chips. It's just that capitalism inherently centralizes, and capitalism runs the show.
It's better to limit companies by number of employees, not worth. That way, you break up the economy into modular components that humans can more easily understand (and whose outputs can be used by other companies). Also, it pushes for more efficiency. And it lowers barriers to entry.
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