Comment by alecco
7 hours ago
I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies.
This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit.
I hope some day someone figures a better way.
> They never address the long-tail nature of productivity...
Mondragon tries to address this through accepting bounded inequality. 9:1 pay ratio from highest-paid to lowest-paid is allowed (still far below US median corporation 192:1 ratio). They decouple democratic ownership from operational management. They funnel profits into individual internal capital accounts in proportion to the worker's pay, payable upon retirement or dissociation from the cooperative. They heavily subsidize continuing education to lift the long tail baseline skillsets.
However, I suspect none of the above is effective without the right cultural context. The Basque region where Mondragon's cultural center of gravity still heavily draws upon and resides within, laid the fertile cultural cues the cooperative leverages. High competence individuals are rewarded within this Basque-centric cultural context with high social status, reasonable job security, and the psychological reward of building up their own community.
If that supposition is true, then the uncomfortable reality is the dominant, hyper-individualistic American cultural context will always be a poor fit to co-ops. That might be made irrelevant through demographic replacement: everywhere the hyper-individualistic culture dominates, it is currently eliminating families with no demographic end in sight. We shall see.
do you think neutral ai moderation and time limits on discussion would have the desired effect?
I believe this is the right solution and the one cahootz is proposing. The Coop AI moderator can be fed goals in the json and a unstructured charter that anyone in or out of the coop can see. Then before decision are made you would be required submit a proposal. This would allow the most and least significant member access to the funds on a more equal basis.