[notacoward]

> a million labs with $10 research budgets aren't going to be able to compete with one lab with a research budget of $10,000,000.

And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market. If everything is better when centralized, then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)?

> Concentration of capital and talent is how progress gets made after all

That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes distribution is. It varies from field to field, from time to time, and the ideal is rarely found at the extremes. The problem Young sought to address is that various factors tend to pull us toward a non-ideal extreme, and that tendency must be resisted.

[collyw]

>then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)

Because most governments seem corrupt to some extent or other and we don't trust them. Free markets seem to solve this problem to some extent. The degrees to which people believe these two statements seem to be the basis for a lot of left right / politics IMHO.

[notacoward]

> most governments seem corrupt

And a single company effectively functioning as a government (minus democratic accountability) would be better? Free markets only solve that problem through competition, which precludes the kind of centralization the GP was advocating.

[j9461701]

>And yet, the idea that ten labs with $1M budgets might be better than either is a cornerstone of the free market.

How many Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs? How many out of Joe Random's Inventoroum Garage?

This was actually one of the things communists argued was an inherent flaw of capitalism they hoped to fix. Ten companies with ten advertising budgets are basically wasting resources competing with each other when the far more effecient solution from a macro economic is one big company that owns the market that can invest all its budget into research or making movies or what have you without wasting some high fraction of its budget on ads.

The ultimate problem with this idea wasn't the communist's logic about the power of concentrating wealth, but rather their inability to appreciate that humans can't be trusted to behave in that kind of environment. The ten companies with ten ad budgets may not be as effecient as one big company, but they're each a check against the other - if ever one lab becomes incompetent the others out compete it and it either improves or dies. Via this Darwinian process companies, and the economy, remain fit. That the ten small labs aren't as productive in raw numbers as one big lab isn't as important as this free hand of the market being allowed to so its job.

The Soviet Union in the 80s produced more steel, cement, and tractors that America despite having half the population. Efficiency. It was also a massively corrupt state rotting from the inside out wasting massive resources on steel and tractors no one needed because those "one big central companies" has been allowed to run unchecked by market forces for 70 years.

>That's just way too simplistic. Sometimes concentration is better. Sometimes distribution is.

I don't think it is. I think concentration of capital is inherently how advances get made. That concentration of capital must be coupled with some mechanism to ensure that capital is being put toward societally productive ends (instead of building ever more tractors in a society that could desperately use a computer) is a different thing. Distribution is one possible solution to the problem yes, but there are others and simply saying "concentration and distribution are both important" doesn't seem t me to capture the spirit of the thing.

[notacoward]

> How many Nobel Prizes came out of Bell Labs? How many out of Joe Random's Inventoroum Garage?

How many new Nobel prizes came out of smaller (mostly university) labs? A lot more. How many billion-dollar companies have their origins in those other labs, or in Bell's own but only because that centralization was undone by the breakup of its parent? Again quite a lot, some now even bigger than that parent used to be. Not a good argument for centralization.

When we're talking about economics, Nobel prizes are completely the wrong metric anyway. Even basic science benefits from having multiple labs, at universities and other orgs all across the world, sometimes competing with one another and sometimes extending or complementing each other's work. If anything, that's even more true when science turns to engineering turns to business. I might have thought that was obvious here at site hosted by a startup incubator.

You're practically arguing that monopolies are good, which is just crazy on both a practical and a moral level.