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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Are there any other ways to effectively organize an economy?

This subthread doesn't seem too promising, but I'd genuinely like to know.

I actually like the idea that the workforce own businesses instead of Capital owning them. There is no reason not to have cooperatives run everything, however often successful co-ops tend to float because the workforce can see a big payoff. Greed doesn't need to define the reason why businesses are created though.

Maybe instead of pay defining where you are within an organisation it's how much vote you get in the business. And obviously you can engage in peer to peer performance review system like Valve. To be honest I'd only ask one question; How much do you want to work with X again? 0 - 10.

The Valve system just leads to cliques and making it tough to get things done.

Almost like all big organisations.

All of this is possible in the current economy – Many companies are founded by employees. However, I'm personally comvinced they are not efficient, neither in decision-making nor in usage of the workforce. So what happens to them, and why aren't they the most common form of employment? Maybe some don't keep their form of cooperative decision-making, maybe others never make it big on the market, maybe creators of such companies don't intend to become AirBnb or Amazon and prefer a lifestyle business – all in all, traditional companies still dominate them.

I think it's because being a cooperative is not a stable state. You can go cooperative->traditional, but it's much harder to transition from traditional->cooperative.

Ultimately, a hierarchical society is instinctively easy to grasp, while a more fluid mostly-equal one is not. People still instinctively understand hierarchies better than full-on democracy.

> People still instinctively understand hierarchies better

instinctively? Citation needed. If anything, humans are wired to interact in small and non-hierarchical groups.

Access to capital whilst remaining a coop is the big problem here - speaking as a former cooperator

We could mostly stick with the regulated market system that a majority of industrialized nations have now, but with higher taxes on investment income and inheritance, and more robust social services to prevent wealth from accumulating to handful of people.

It might also help to have stronger unions and more businesses structured as worker-owned co-ops, public benefit corporations, and non-profits.

What do you think about France? It looks like a good, first approximation of your proposal, many people defend worker-owned businesses here, "service public citoyen" (public benefit corporations), it's difficult to amass wealth (the only rich are from inheritance) and would unionize the hell against powerful corporations if Apple were born here. Drawback: We don't have Apple, we have DailyMotion and people don't aim to become huge enough to compete against Silicon Valley startups.

I don't like being entrepreneur in this context personally, but the startup ecosystem is thriving in Paris and Lyon and I sure hope the current generation is about to issue some major players. I personally fail to see how they can be profitable with our tax levels, social obligations and regulations, but it may happen.

List of hot startups in France: http://www.eu-startups.com/2017/02/10-french-startups-to-loo...

I don't know enough about France to have an opinion one way or another (I visited once for a few days back in 2000), but what you say sounds mostly good.

From a startup perspective, I think complex regulations are a bigger impediment than taxes; any company that starts as a couple people in a garage shouldn't have to be experts in corporate law in addition to whatever problem they're trying to solve.

I expect in order to have a successful environment for startups to happen, you need network effects of smart people congregating in one place and be a place where creative people would want to live. Having good universities really helps. It seems like France should be able to supply those things, but as I said, I don't have specific recent knowledge about what France is like these days.

Since you seem to be the right audience, I'll advertise it to you ;) ...especially since I'm rather a candidate to leave this country!

> You need network effects of smart people

We definitely have this, especially in the heart of Paris, and in other cities too. I've lived in Madrid and Sydney, therefore I dare giving my opinion, with the limitation that I'm not a serial entrepreneur in each of those cities.

> where creative people would want to live

Well, it's Paris, land of Macron, of Montmartre, and social mixity with black/white/arabs/traders/social-workers/low-income living together, etc. A lot of people live this mixity, fertile for ideas and leverage. The glamour is however balanced by high rental costs (=most often living far in the suburbs) and medium pays (60k€ per year is high for us, but health, unemployment, youth education and retirement are included).

> Good universities

We have plenty of excellent engineering and management schools (Centrale, X, INSA, EM Lyon, INSEAD, Les Mines, HEC), half of them free and nonetheless excellent (In France free doesn't mean students are bad, rather the opposite). We're not well versed in international rankings, so Australian unis may rank above us, but I'm persuaded it's more about tweaking the rankings than student IQ.

Given the impression you give, maybe have a business trip in Paris and interview people in coworking spaces to have alternative opinions? You may love France!

Why would you discourage investment with higher taxes? there is a reason that capital gains is treated differently and double taxing dividends also has negative effects.

Why would you discourage labor with higher taxes than investments? That argument cuts both ways

Without capital companies go bust unless you think that Stalinist central planning is a good system

Stalinist central planning is actually Leninist, and it still has capital, just not private property in it (and, consequently, a different way of allocating it.)

Without capital, a productive effort fails under Stalinism, too.

The extractive nature of business can't be fixed without changing things more fundamentally, but basic income or another strong safety net combined with free college education and health care makes labor participation much less coercive. If you can say no to a bad deal, the ideals of the free market are realized in much greater force.

Notably, we often respect this in our colleagues. We lionize "fuck you money" and appreciate when our friends have earned their way into the ability to act according to their inclinations. However, at least on this board, I think there is an over emphasis on needing to earn or otherwise deserve that bare level of respect.

Workers saying no in greater numbers provides stronger checks on corporate behavior. A sibling comment discusses worker owned businesses, which is a stronger form of this.

I'm a big fan of the idea of having business owned by their employees instead of a handful of shareholders.

John Lewis Partnership in the UK have this model.

Up to a point the outsourced cleaners are no longer partners for example.

In practice that tends to mean concentrating power in the hands of a single presidential leader (since employees are less well-organized than shareholders, and more likely to have day jobs) and/or allowing unprofitable divisions to drag the whole enterprise down long after they should've been shuttered. It has its upsides (at a minimum it tends to lead to a better level of basic decency in working conditions) but it's not a panacea.

Yeah, communism, but it only works in post scarcity domains, such as open source software. If there is scarcity there will be selfishness.

I don't think what happens in open source software is accurately described as "communism" in any sense of that word. Especially considering that OSS in practice is a scheme for corporations (including those in direct competition with each other) to pool resources and share their research and development costs.

I agree with your comment. We have to keep in mind that "communism" is a word for utopian society (e.g. no state, no "money", no classes, and common ownership over the means of production) which is the end goal of "socialists" stemming from "Marxism" which is a socio-economic analysis of class relations. The core of "socialism" is the question about ownership of the means of production (as explained by Marx).

The chief reason for why free and open source software isn't "communism" in any sense of the package of things that word contains is that in practise it almost always leads to a very controlled extreme planned centralised collectivist systems. Free and open software development and communities on the other hand are based on extremely individualistic non-centralised non-planned and non-governed system.

If free and open software was inherently "Communist" or "Marxist", then we'd have "ONE FREE OS, ONE FREE DESKTOP, AND ONE FREE DESIGN". Instead we have several free software operating systems, dozens of competing desktop environments, and uncountable number of designs for every individual taste. If you want to know more about this point of view, I recommend you read the "Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich von Hayek.

It's true that in free and open source software we people share the code and tools (i.e. the means of production) to some degree. However we people still inherently govern the domains of our work and we get rewarded for the work that gets done. Instead of "money", hackers often get rewarded e.g. by "fame". Eric S. Raymond explains quite well in his book Cathedral and the Bazaar how this works and in great detail too.

But most importantly there is no central planner which would dictate how things work and coordinate the operations. If some guy doesn't like how a free and open software project is being developed, he can fork the fuck out of it and create a competing project. And this makes it sound more like anarcho-capitalism than anything else. We don't have "centralised state" that would set the framework where code is allowed to happen and "market of ideas" operates. This fits into agenda of our current corporatist society quite well and even companies which are in direct competition can benefit from it pouring resources to projects of mutual interest.

It's true that when we inspect how free and open software projects are developed, we at times counter cases of central-planner but often we notice that this entity is restricted by the pressure from the users and the fear of having project forked and lost "fame" / "reputation". This is basically why "dictators" that lead their projects aren't sole rulers of their domains. Most commonly we see governing bodies of few selected individuals aka. oligarchies that manage the free and open software project.

When the Fed stops dispersing cheap money to banks, who disperse it to publicly traded companies...

and when the "regulators" and "prosecutors" and "judges" aren't vacation pals with the Fortune 500 CEOs...

then maybe we will have some kind of a true free market, and not just an illusion of one run by the American Corporate Mafia :)

All businesses in America are fighting a zero sum game. Values and ethics are chucked out the window once you grow past Mojang's size. Out goes the employee ownership and work-life balance, in comes the desparation to grow into a monopoly. Wall St is a knife fight in my opinion. There will always be a competitor more desperate than you to win, and the market will reward them for it.

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