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Comment by artfulhippo | Hacker News Reader

> Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly ——

I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That’s the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What’s the new idea here?

1) What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics?

2) When businesses acquire their competitors, does this accelerate or inhibit progress?

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He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together.

Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.

not sure that means it generalizes to all countries or types of business

Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability.

He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal

2) Is a monopoly or a perfectly competitive business better for societal progress?

In theory, a monopoloy would be because you can make more profit and constantly reinvest more than any competitor into making better products and holding your monopoly.

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in practice, because monopolies tend to buy competitors in order to stifle competition rather than reinvesting and building a better product.

So I think acquiring competitors tends to inhibit progress because you are wasting money that you could be reinvesting into building a better product for society.

The flip side is that if companies are making less profit, there might be more consumer surplus, leading to more savings (which can also be reinvested in the economy) or a higher standard of living.

Yes, but the average person with savings isn't going to create wealth in any way that a business can with that money. Most especially if that money is "saved" in stocks or bonds. This might be better for people in the short term, but we are talking about sociatal progress not short term benefits.

But there's the obviously counterexamples of companies hoarding billions and not paying dividends because they don't know what to do with it.

> What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics?

It does sound a bit "Economic history. You've invented economic history." Mind you, VC/Koch-style libertarians are the only people who could be accused of that, given the recent beef between self-described economic historians and self-described historians of capitalism.

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