lots of people aren’t skilled enough to defend themselves in a market, and so they accept the trade of participating in a command hierarchy without a clear picture of what the alternatives would be that would be similarly acceptable risk but a better tradeoff for them, and thus most of the value they create gets captured by the other side of that trade. worse, individual market participant workers don’t typically have access to the synchronized action of taking the same command all at once—even though the overwhelming majority of payout from synchronized action go to the employer side of the trade. unions help some, but ultimately kind of suck for a few reasons compared to some theoretical ideal we don’t know how to instantiate, which would allow boundedly rational agents to participate in markets and not get screwed over by superagents with massively more compute.
my hunch is that a web of microeconomies within organizations, where everyone in the microeconomy trusts each other to not be malicious, might produce more globally rational behavior. but I suspect a lot of it is that it’s hard to make a contract that guarantees transparency without this being used by an adversarial agent to screw you over, and transparency is needed for the best outcomes. how do you trust a firm you can’t audit?
and I don’t think internal economies work unless you have a co-op with an internal economy, that can defend itself against adversarial firms’ underhanded tactics. without the firm being designed to be leak-free in the sense of not having massive debts to shareholders which not only are interest bearing but can’t even be paid off, nobody who has authority to change the structure has a local incentive to do so. combined with underhanded tactics from the majority of wealthy firms that make it hard to construct a more internally incentive-aligned, leak-free firm, we get the situation we see.
lots of people aren’t skilled enough to defend themselves in a market, and so they accept the trade of participating in a command hierarchy without a clear picture of what the alternatives would be that would be similarly acceptable risk but a better tradeoff for them, and thus most of the value they create gets captured by the other side of that trade. worse, individual market participant workers don’t typically have access to the synchronized action of taking the same command all at once—even though the overwhelming majority of payout from synchronized action go to the employer side of the trade. unions help some, but ultimately kind of suck for a few reasons compared to some theoretical ideal we don’t know how to instantiate, which would allow boundedly rational agents to participate in markets and not get screwed over by superagents with massively more compute.
my hunch is that a web of microeconomies within organizations, where everyone in the microeconomy trusts each other to not be malicious, might produce more globally rational behavior. but I suspect a lot of it is that it’s hard to make a contract that guarantees transparency without this being used by an adversarial agent to screw you over, and transparency is needed for the best outcomes. how do you trust a firm you can’t audit?
and I don’t think internal economies work unless you have a co-op with an internal economy, that can defend itself against adversarial firms’ underhanded tactics. without the firm being designed to be leak-free in the sense of not having massive debts to shareholders which not only are interest bearing but can’t even be paid off, nobody who has authority to change the structure has a local incentive to do so. combined with underhanded tactics from the majority of wealthy firms that make it hard to construct a more internally incentive-aligned, leak-free firm, we get the situation we see.