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by gradschoolfail 666 days ago
I was guessing that 082349872349872 was trying to motivate a historical understanding of the slicing of pies ;)

No, seriously: Hopefully, I’m not replying to an credentialed expert here, but empirico-historical (=archaelogical?)methods seem underrated for advancing institutional (meso-)economics. Don’t know if this is as recognized a subfield as “organizational cybernetics” yet — I’m thinking of figures like Veblen and Lord Skidelsky, but how about more quantitative folks I have no idea of?

Anyways, would you argue with me, the question is how to use price-setting mechanisms to allocate resources/experts at the inter/intra-organizational level. You don’t want openAI to concentrate all the world’s RLHF researchers, but you also don’t want to spread the experts out so thin that they can’t run into each other outside of Silicon Valley.

There’s a tightrope to walk between centralization and decentralization, I like that this blog series is exploring related issues, and I’m thrilled that some of us here are interested in engaging on the topic:

Since nothing is new under the sun, yes, we should study how firms have managed to converge to a rather precise 30-70 split, instead of (only)what Coaseans have been pontificating all along :)

[Market design and transaction-cost reductions seem to be generally more sensible for optimizing information flow than manipulation of legal frameworks around hiring practices (see the eternal fiasco over NDAs/noncompetes)]

The other more peripheral thing related to Minsky is that the study of expertise at the individual level could also be interesting, GP and I have an ongoing discussion about that; i think its relevant but GP seems to differ?*

The concrete question we are thinking of, is how do experts split their attention between central and peripheral issues, hopefully this can be answered more sophisticatedly [i.e. quantitatively] than just handwaving the exploitation-exploration trade-off? Well experiments migggghhht just be possible in this model ;)

Btw another topic GP and I have been wrestling with, is of the clash of values within Chinese-run firms in Sweden. Maybe you can help us locate sources ;)

*Footnote for GP with regards to “his” small-minds/wide-world dichotomy.

Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" [including social media — insertion mine] sphere of society on the other.

1 comments

My thought was that it would be interesting to look at such timeseries data for discontinuities that you could correlate against historical events to get some insight into the impact of policy decisions, and the development of neoliberal capitalism.

The plateau at 30% (assuming it is a plateau) seems reasonable. Unless goods are counted twice, a stable upper limit is clearly 50%, as firms output something eventually, and presumably the value of the goods never decrease in the value chain.