Are megacorp really more efficient than many smaller scale and local businesses?
Like in software: a 5 developer team is more efficient and has less overhead than Facebook, but a 5 dev team can't build a Facebook.
I'm confident that I could build a social network that scales with a 3 person team. In fact, I've done it before, but it relied on hosting and data providers and frontend frameworks and languages that I definitely could not have developed the entirety of as a 2-person team.
Do those factor into the count, or are we in the "if you do everything yourself, a cup of coffee actually costs $300,000?" At what point does labor specialization come into play? Because there's the guy who does everything "from scratch" and realizes exorbitant costs for small things, and on the other end of the spectrum is the guy who started a profitable coffee company with $1800 of seed capital, down to the practical reality of the median cup of drip coffee, brewed at home, costs approximately $0.30.
Similarly, sure a 5-dev team probably couldn't build and operate the full-scope of FB (unlike the clone someone could build in a weekend that doesn't take into account hundreds of small capabilities) - but maybe a 500-dev group could, rather than needing 5000-devs. Especially with a narrower focus on scope and outsourcing various problems (such as do they need to operate their own video hosting platform vs partnering).
There are advantages to scale, but also costs, and at a certain point scale tends to be horizontal rather than vertical. More products/features/adjacencies that now need to be coordinated, rather than a solid core and leverging the market for the rest.
Isn't the claim that decentralized free trade facilitated by delegation is more efficient? If not, I think we need a new theory of why the USSR failed as there seems to be a contradiction here.
Any system, bureaucracy, TTRPG ruleset, etc that prioritizes a single figure over the whole will inevitably erode the value the whole produces in favor of empowering the single figure. It's a matter of accountability. In a single figure system, the only accountability is to the single figure's personal whims.
What do you mean by that? Before the industrial revolution starvation was widespread in human populations.
What I mean is that you don't have to eat nice steaks and a full fish every day, sometimes twice a day.
It's not true, despite population increase number of people dying of starvation goes down https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/famine/ the reason of starvation in modern times is political, not production shortage.
How many farming fields and insects have been destroyed with chemicals and genetic modifications from that wonderfull revolution?
Humans have been destroying habitats for as long as we find ourselves in the fossil record.
I don't see how 1000 companies couldn't feed us but ten 100x-larger companies can. What you gain in economies of scale you lose on competitive edge.
Also I prefer my food coming from megacorps clean rooms. Food poisoning is no fun- as anyone who's ever been to India can tell you.
Those clean rooms exist because of government regulations - not because of the existence of megacorps.
There's another school of thought that believes in regulatory capture and says those regulations are there to make it harder for someone to compete in the market, and that safety is further down the list than making money is.