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I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.

I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.

Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.

This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.

Can this work? No idea.

7 comments

Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.

Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies

How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.

I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.

The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.

Greek city states and German petty kingdoms suggest conflict and failure to unite vs external threats common.

One problem I see is even in representational democracy (I'll use the Westminster system for concreteness) we get a lot of indirection leading to policies people don't actually want. Even more indirection is bad.

Assume members of parliament are chosen fairly (popular vote approximates number of seats etc). The winning party (or parties) form a cabinet - their own little hierarchy. What we tend to see is a majority of cabinet members voting in cabinet for a policy, a majority of their caucus voting to support their policy (relying on cabinet solidarity to get the numbers across the line), then a majority of parliament passing a bill (using the solidarity of the party to get it across the line). The agenda may have been set by just a few parliamentarians (say just 9 out 17 cabinet members in a parliament of ~100) and an unpolular policy comes to pass.

I'd fear having local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives would have even worse outcomes in terms of representing the individuals at the "bottom" of this process. There is a reason representatives are voted for directly at each level of governments in our democracies - this wasn't a "simplification" it was a deliberate choice by our forebearers who had seen how politics shakes out in practice.

> local representatives choosing state representatives choosing federal representatives

You don't have to have that though. You can still have a local population electing local, state, and federal representatives. But you need the taxation, and thus the financial power, to flow upwards from local government, not downwards from federal governments.

> Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up...

Works well with Georgism. If all tax is land and resources, it makes sense to collect locally. If most of your tax is income and company tax, it's bound to be collected at state or federal levels.

I've always believed that power should be devolved to the lowest level possible, but you're right that powers-that-be will not willingly give up centralised power.

In the US, local governments are often far worse than state and federal governments.

In general, it's because it's harder for the larger entities to get away with playing favorites (I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm saying that it happens a lot more in smaller units).

Paying all your taxes to the corrupt local judge (county official) is in fact not a win.

It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.

And developers

But local governments are much easier to leave than state or federal governments. And easier to influence if you decide to stay.

The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around

Probably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.

Reminder that Greeks were right and representative democracy is not democracy at all, but another form of oligarchy.

Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.

Yeah a lot of management isn’t just a desire for power and control over others, but just the unglamorous and boring work of tracking what everyone is working on and how it fits into the bigger picture. In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization.

"In large organizations it becomes harder and harder for individual contributors to see how their work fits into the larger organization."

... because the planning and reasoning and vision aren't shared? As an IC - in small and large companies - I would often get this "you just don't understand" and "you don't see the big picture". Well.. because it's not shared. Decisions made in secret, or in boardrooms without any transparency... yeah - of course I don't have the full picture. I bet half the upper management doesn't either - they all just have their slices.

Some companies - typically smaller - sometimes have shared details on direction/vision/etc enough so that everyone could have a common shared sense of purpose and goals. But I've found that to be relatively rare.

Yes, good management is rare.

I believe companies where ICs understand how their role ties into the overall success of the company will outperform other companies on average.

Maybe, there is an aspect of things being deliberately kept hidden, but also communicating this stuff is just pretty hard. Large organizations often spend huge amounts of effort on it and still get things wrong.

That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.

We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.

Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.

It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.

Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.

It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.

Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.

So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.

"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.

If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.

Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)

TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.

You would need an explanation for how every single culture in human history conditions people in this way, if it’s not connected to human nature.

I mean... that's just.. wrong?

Indigenous North American cultures, Amish cultures, medieval monastic communities, the list goes on.

Really, you can't just make blanket claims like that over _all of human history_ and expect to be right.

False statements require no explanation.

Well, the comment you're replying to is patently false, as explained in a separate comment.

If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.

1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?

Cybersyn was an experiment and we don't really know if it would have worked or not because the USA arranged for a military coup to destroy it ...

I think later systems were at a core an attempt to implement something like high-frequency (which is a misnomer, it's more like low-latency) trading over 1960-70s tech at a scope that we still have no means to do now, in 2020s.

"trading" was ideologically prohibited term which didn't help any.

And the whole centralized approach cannot scale.

So there you have it: it can't work, please bring new ideas.

It's impossible to debate a topic with someone who takes anecdotes, declares it is proof of something and then says smugly "there you have it!"

I think people could try social experiments and compare the productivity differences resulting from different management styles on LLMs instead of humans.

My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.

“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.

It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.

But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.

It certainly has to be considered.

China and the Soviet Union are the largest scale attempts to implement a cooperative system and they failed in spectacular and tragic ways. So you certainly need to consider why the new plan will be different and won’t meet the same fate.

China failed? They seem to be doing well to me.

Their Communist system failed. They experienced increasing prosperity when they adopted capitalism.

"Cooperative system" is such an immensely broad net. I could also say that the largest scale attempt ever at implementing a competitive system failed when the market crashed in 2008, so you probably shouldn't try starting a company again. But that would be silly, wouldn't it?

For whatever it's worth, I'm not a communist or a Soviet apologist or what have you. I also just think it's incredibly silly that Westerners are so conditioned to jump at the hint of the Soviet's shadow when there's any suggestion that capitalism might not be the most effective economic system.

The common counterpoint to that is "capitalism isn't perfect, but it's the best we got!" And maybe I'm naive, but I can't help but think humans can do way better. Isn't capitalism supposed to be a bet on human ingenuity? Then why do we pretend that humans are inherently limited when it comes to creating a good society?

Rationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise.

Edit spelling

Also an unwillingness to examine their own irrational biases, seeing them only in other people.

I believe something like this is the future... fully open and cooperative organizational structures, where members fund projects and all decision making and financing is fully transparent. Also no idea whether it could actually work, but I don't see why not. The open source movement/community shows us a lot is possible.

Look into Haier's RenDanHeYi philosophy. One of my ambitions is to adopt that model when I start a company, and I think it is awesome and the future.

BTW, seems like we think similarly regarding this. Wanna exchange contact info? my email is mclaren212@gmail.com if you're interested in connecting

That's how the oldest European universities worked originally, the students hired the teachers. I don't remember how long that system lasted or exactly why it ended, but the history might be instructive.

"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.

The only mechanism like that I’m aware of is the market, but a large organization shields smaller teams and individuals from being measured by it.

Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.

Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.

Reminds me of Medvedev and Putin.