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B Jacobs
Karma: 523
If worker coops are so productive, why aren’t they everywhere?
Reasons to vote in non-deterministic elections
I think this might just be a US thing. Worker co-ops employ tens of millions of people (probably more than a 100 million, though it’s hard to count) and they’re dirt common in countries like France and Italy.
I haven’t looked into why the US is so resistant to co-ops but if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it’s probably a more hostile legal environment (plus half a century of anti-socialism/collectivization & pro-capitalism/privatization propaganda).
There’s also an element of self-reinforcement. Capitalist firms do better when there are more capitalist firms around, co-ops do better with more co-ops around.This legal-loophole-story is also news to me (probably also a US thing?), though I am familiar with a similar dynamic. From what I read coops do tend to include new workers into the fold, but they don’t do this with contract workers. This would mean co-ops are an excellent way to improve upon traditional firms, but not a way to get rid of this new gig-economy. In any case, giving some workers a say is still an improvement over the status-quo.
don’t make it impossible
Beware trivial inconveniences. Where do the preferences come from? If someone puts a jumpable lava-moat between me (+all other blond people) and the voting booth, I have a “revealed preference” to no longer go out and vote. When the classical liberals then point at the data showing that blond people have a lower preference for voting they’re not wrong, but they are misleading.
One thing I am unclear on is (if we know) why trust was decreasing.
That’s beyond the scope of this post. I presented some studies that point the finger at rising inequality, but it’s probably more than just the increase in wealth disparity. If I had to guess, social trust is probably also one of those common goods capitalists are burning when maximizing shareholder value, but I’d have to look into it more.
The goal should obviously be to increase trustworthiness, but since that’s (at least somewhat) subjective, I would settle for increasing the benefits that come with high-trust-societies I mentioned in the post.
Why do you think that?
How worker co-ops can help restore social trust
You definitely need to think about these things to value working in a coop (or a corporation in which part of your compensation is voting stock) vs “just a job”. If you are going to just grant a proxy, you’d prefer to be paid more in money and less in control.
This is a false dilemma. By granting a proxy you can keep the money while relinquishing control. But even if it was true that you’d be sacrificing money there are still people who don’t want to think about corporate governance but do want to fight the evils of capitalism and thus would be happy to give a fellow co-op member a proxy rather than earning a bit more (e.g. me).
I upvoted, but I don’t expect it to be particularly popular or front-page-worthy. It may be partly about the vibe, but I suspect it’s mostly about the content—it’s a little less rigorous in causality of impact than the more common front-page topics, and it comes across as an attempt to influence rather than to explore or analyze from a rational(ist) standpoint.
No it’s the vibe, I ran a natural experiment to test it and it’s clearly just the vibe. I posted the same measured even-handed post on co-ops to the EA forum and LW, but in the former they were called co-ops in the latter socialst firms. The former was upvoted, the latter was downvoted. Also, the most venerated posts on LW (e.g. the sequences) often don’t even cite their sources, while that post cited dozens of scientific studies. Also also, my other recent post on co-ops was also data-heavy and it also got downvoted. Rationalists just have an anti-socialist bias.
Ah thanks! I’m probably just in an unlucky timezone then.
The literal, narrow interpretation of what you say is true, but what is implied is not. Coops do work well as many-billion-dollar enterprises, not just as a local consumer-service organization. E.g. Mondragon had a total revenue of 11 billion euros in 2023, while maintaining growth, since that was a 5% increase from the year before.
Also, you don’t necessarily need to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions in a coop, since you can grant someone a proxy.
Also also, why are socialist-vibe blogposts so often relegated to “personal blogpost” while capitalist-vibe blogposts aren’t? I mean, I get the automatic barrage of downvotes, but you’d think the mods would at least try to appear impartial.
Why giving workers stocks isn’t enough — and what co-ops get right
How Democratic Is Effective Altruism — Really?
Problems with Bayesianism: A Socratic Dialogue
Since I talked about existing worker co-ops I obviously knew co-ops exist, and this was (I had hoped clearly) talking about conventional firms, which do not have that structure. Even when workers own stocks in conventional firms, they (in the vast majority of cases) do not have control. I made a whole post about this if you’re interested.
Thanks! Yeah, I think I’ll do that (in a couple weeks)
How prediction markets can create harmful outcomes: a case study
Which meat to eat: CO₂ vs Animal suffering
This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:
the probability that one would actually go ahead and vote in a race does correlate with the strength of one’s preferences. So, perhaps, this is indeed working as intended.
This doesn’t take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer minority increases saw only 34 closures.
They also placed restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on drop-off locations. For example; Harris County, which had only one drop-off location for 2.4 million voters.
It’s not so much the strength of preferences that determines who votes, as much as who is systematically discouraged from voting.
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No, ownership is not the same, I explicitly said so in a previous post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7bqzFLqEoz44y6C6o/why-giving-workers-stocks-isn-t-enough-and-what-co-ops-get