[tempaccount9473]

> The Corporate System is actually collapsing.

[Citation needed]

I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.

Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed.

Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.

[prostoalex]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristie-arslan/five-big-myths-...

"large businesses only employ about 38 percent of the private sector workforce while small businesses employ 53 percent of the workforce. In fact, over 99 percent of employing organizations are small businesses and more than 95 percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees"

Affordable health care is pretty much the last major benefit that puts a large corporate employer at an advantage to a small business or self-employed status. With health exchanges and affordable (?) health care kicking in next year the parent assertion might be correct.

[tptacek]

I think this is likely to be a sleight of hand analysis on the HuffPo columnist's part. Firms with fewer than ten employees, which the column alludes to when talking about small businesses, make up just 5% of employer firms. Census doesn't define "small business", and SBA defines it in the context of specific verticals, so that a small manufacturer might have 500 employees while a small law firm might have far fewer. Whatever the case, firms with 500+ employees represent by far the largest segment of all employer firms, by just about 3x the number of employees of any other bracket.

(Caveat: I may be misreading some of this.)

[prostoalex]

Looks like the original stats (38% of US workforce employed by large businesses, 53% by small) were pulled from Wikipedia, which then refers to SBA.gov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Em...

[rayiner]

I disagree with this assertion that corporations are a "terrible way of turning human labor into work product." In industries like software? Sure. In industries like coal mining? Explain to me how a decentralized structure would be a more efficient way of marshaling the capital resources and labor necessary to blow the top off a mountain and extract a bunch of rocks from the carcass.

[michaelochurch]

Well, I'm not a fan of mountaintop removal. Still, I get your point, and you're right. I shouldn't say "corporations" are terrible at that, because there are a lot of processes that require (if nothing else) the legal structure of one, but that a certain management style associated with the 20th-century large corporation is counterproductive.

We can't know, because we can't go back in time, but I feel like those coal miners would have been just as productive (if not moreso) if they were better compensated for their work.

[rdouble]

As a point of interest, miners in Australia are astoundingly well compensated and taken care of compared to resource extraction workers in other countries.

[gehar]

As a point of information,

that was a point of information, not a point of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_information

[michaelochurch]

Mao says: no use of the words "point of interest" while in a point of interest. Three penalty cards!

[michaelochurch]

I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.

Nor mine, not in the short term.

Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight.

Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed.

The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe.

Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many).

Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades.

In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint.

So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.

[tptacek]

This is an artfully written comment, the way it peppers paragraphs of opinion with factoids that make it look authoritative but don't in fact back any of the points up. "From 1945 to 2008..." perks up "people believed in corporations" groan.

It's a hall of mirrors. You look closely and suddenly "the right wing" is "The Tea Party", and "The Tea Party" is "anti-corporate", or "In 1999, if you said the world was run by evil people [...] you'd be seen as a bitter loser". But worse than the occasional verifiably false premise is the fact that the whole comment is slippery, written deliberately to avoid being pinned down and interrogated.

[jarek]

Ah yes, and here we have the "tptacek shitting on a comment using big words and smart-sounding phrases" comment. ;)

[tptacek]

Which of the words I used were "big"?

You're right: I'm definitely pooping on the comment. Can't claim the high ground there at all.

[jarek]

I'll respond as I myself hate when people leave me hanging after I respond to their snark... "factoid" (arguably used incorrectly), "authoritative", "verifiably false premise".

It could be written more simply. You're not wrong, of course, but I've seen you take-down posts like that a couple of times now, so a comment seemed fair. (I realize it's not far off from how you normally write, but the effect is different in a take-down post.) IMHO of course.

[tptacek]

No, thank you. This is where I do all of my writing, and I appreciate the feedback. One of my coworkers once made a word cloud of all my HN comments, and it was embarrassing (a small galaxy of words relating to argumentativeness) and ever since, I've worried that my lazier writing is easy to spot for how puffy and prolix it is.

Though, for what it's worth: I used "factoid" in the sense of "concept related as a fact that probably isn't a fact".

It was really nice of you to take the time to write that. Thanks again.

[tbrownaw]

The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing.

This has never been the case. Large corporations do not employ the majority of people.

[tptacek]

Yes, they do. They're not even just the largest employer bracket; they literally employ a majority of the employed in America.

[tbrownaw]

Hm...

http://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.htm

Firms with 250+ employees have been slightly >50% since 1996.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewfs.nr0.htm

37.4% of employees are at firms of 1000+, 6.8% are 500-999, 7.2% are 250-499.

So either the numbers I remembered were a bit outdated, or were using a higher cutoff than 250 (probably 500, since I remember it being not that much less than 50% working at "large" corporations).

[tptacek]

I'm looking at "Statistics about Business Size", and considering as "large businesses" those firms with 500+ employees, as that's the largest top-level bracket they track. Within the 500+ bracket, firms with 5000+ employees are (for whatever it's worth) the largest component by far.

[benaston]

Citation?

[tptacek]

Census.