Thanks in turn :).
I had read The Refragmentation before, but I reread it shortly after reading your article to make sure I hadn’t missed something. I definitely think that Graham is onto something, but I’m just not sure that it actually cashes out into a lower maze level overall. In particular, deregulation seems to have reduced the size of moats around incumbents, but doesn’t seem to have resulted in an overall reduction in firm size; instead, what happened is that incumbents were merged or reorganized, and in some cases upstarts replaced them and grew bigger. But this does not necessarily mean that the replacements were less maze-like. Microsoft is now bigger than IBM, but does it actually have less middle-management maze behavior?
I seem to recall stats to the effect that the largest N corporations employ a steadily-increasing portion of the population and the economy, which would support this analysis. Unfortunately, I can’t find a data set online that shows this, though I did come up with https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_g.txt, which has some interesting data in it. (For example, I didn’t realize that the number of public sector firms was actually that small.)
I also noticed this, tucked away in a footnote inThe Refragmentation:
More precisely, there was a bimodal economy consisting, in Galbraith’s words, of “the world of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the one hand and the hundreds of thousands of small and traditional proprietors on the other.” Money, prestige, and power were concentrated in the former, and there was near zero crossover.
The tiny mom-and-pop store is now much rarer than it used to be. Decades ago, your groceries, home goods, clothes, and gas might all have been bought from retailers that had less than 5 employees, even if they were manufactured by much larger corps. These days you probably get all of them from large organizations.
Hello, LessWrong! Long time reader, first-time commenter.
I think that your description of the counter-maze tendency is wrong, and you’ve misunderstood some aspects of Zvi’s model while being distracted by superficialities in the other. To wit:
Startups employ a trivial percentage of the workforce and do not contribute much to the economy. Startups that get big occupy more economic space, but by that point they’re no longer startups. So the attributes of startup culture are not really relevant to the economy at large.
It’s understood by everyone that being a startup is a kind of corporate childhood—romanticised, but temporary. It is implicitly accepted by everyone, including startup founders, that growing up and becoming a mature, “adult” company requires becoming a maze with multiple levels of hierarchy.
Tech culture is anti-maze only insofar as it consists of startups. All of FAANGM are fully converted to mazes. Consequently, most actual tech workers work within mazes.
The change away from suits etc. is a change of fashion with no impact on the underlying dynamics. Arguably it actually helps out the sociopaths because it replaces a fixed, legible standard of dress with an unclear and illegible question of “culture fit”, which creates more room for maze games.
The move away from “company men” was not a move away from large firms, but rather a move away from a vertical system to a stratified one. In the old system (prior to 1970) you could expect to work your entire life for the same company, and middle and upper management was typically promoted from the rank-and-file. In the newer system, middle and upper management are hired from people with MBAs and other credentials, and they move freely between industries. As a consequence, the maze-nature is transmitted quickly from company to company, and to a certain extent all management everywhere is joined in a super-maze, as all management shares the same culture and experiences which is completely separate from the culture and experiences of the workers.
Actually, this last point deserves more elaboration: according to Zvi, the main thing that mitigates against mazes is direct engagement with the object-level reality. This engagement is present in the rank-and-file, and to a certain extent at the very top, but is absent in the middle. However, in a vertical system of advancement, where management hires are made from within, the middle ranks will at least have a memory of working on the object-level concerns of the firm. The rise of a permanent managerial class means that many middle managers are of a type which has never worked directly on the actual product that their company makes, and whose entire education and experience is in the context of immoral mazes.
So I find it unpersuasive to think that any of the cultural changes of the previous decades have done anything to reverse the advance of mazes as the normative corporate structure, and some of the things that you mention as inhibiting maze structures (such as frequently changing companies over the course of a career) have probably actually accelerated them.
An additional, unrelated note: the model of The Dictator’s Handbook suggests that incentives push away from the middle, towards total democracy (when there are already a large number of key supporters) or total autocracy (where the number of key supporters approaches one). But don’t other models suggest that the middle state of oligarchy is actually the default, and that both democracy and monarchy tend to decay towards oligarchy over time? And aren’t examples of this widespread? I notice that I am confused.