[ForTheKidz]

> Coops are basically geared toward mediocre success - because there's really no pressure to risk aiming for amazing/startup-style success.

I'm just straight-up offended at this. Co-ops are the job most people want. What you refer to as "amazing success" is dismantling our society and the people who run them appear to struggle to empathize with other humans.

Granted, i'm sure coops can be equally antisocial and misanthropic. But growth surely isn't what we want to be optimizing for.

[jjj123]

I think you and I have the same values but I wasn’t offended by the parent comment at all.

It’s clear they meant success as in success in profit and growth, and in that lens, coops do tend towards mediocre success because incentives are different. But I don’t see that as a bad thing, and I don’t think OP does either?

[tonymet]

are there any examples?

[ForTheKidz]

Enshittification is the most obvious one—we should be nationalizing efficient processes at the point they fail to yield further productivity gains.

I don't really have much energy to argue with true believers today, so all I'll say is "read schumpeter dammit". For an industry allegedly founded by the dude I haven't met a single person working with VCs who's actually read the man. He would not consider today's America to have a healthy economy.

[tonymet]

this doesn't sound like an example, more of a complaint

[ForTheKidz]

You didn't bother to articulate what particular claim you wanted an example on. I can't read minds, and you're wasting my time.

[tonymet]

> " Co-ops are the job most people want."

-- what are some examples?

[ForTheKidz]

• Stable employment

• Democratic workplace

• You can have input in whether to optimize for longevity or short-term profit.

• If you do choose to have a profit-sharing, you experience arguably proportional reward for the work you invest.

• Unions are less necessary if you don't need to actively organize to engage in democratic decision structures.

These are examples of qualities that I've found that appear to be desired by the majority of both my tech social-circles and certainly my non-tech-social circles. Certainly there's immense bias in my viewpoint, but I'm not the person equipped to draw together evidence that people want something they aren't even presented with, but it's something I do believe is generally true.

For more historical evidence, to put aside the co-op structure (which is, in my opinion, secondary to the qualities that people want from their business), flat companies have had their moments of popularity with both Valve and Zappos. (obviously neither are co-ops, and I doubt either have labor-proportional profit-sharing now if they ever did, but it's limited evidence people are turned off by the dysfunction of hierarchical businesses.)

More evidence: in the fight between workers and shareholders, shareholders had to use the courts to enforce shareholder primacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. This indicates the natural tendency of society is to mediate between the needs of the shareholders and workers, something most naturally achieved by making the workers the shareholders.

I realize little of this is likely to be as convincing as the evidence of so many for-profit companies largely not owned by workers, but there's a lot of literature discussing the perverse incentives of divorcing ownership (and investment) from labor that is far too large for a HN comment.

There are, of course, very large co-ops others point out (health insurance, REI (I think?), credit unions), but I can't say I have the insight into the historical reasons why they appear in some industries and not others, in some regions (states) and not others, etc etc.

FWIW, I have worked in for-profit environments where I don't own stock and I've observed genuine concern for all the qualities above. This isn't a hard and fast rule. But most of my workplaces don't show this behavior, and it's quite soured me on gambling with my time (the typical capitalist-to-worker-pitch) rather than finding a lower-return but stabler form of employment that prioritizes quality of work and life. You can get a lot of this by working at large tech companies, but they often undersell how much this affects quality of life despite enormous compensation, and also undersell the sort of dysfunction that would normally be remediable if you let the workers have true representation on the board and among stockholders.