Inefficient large companies can also linger on for a long, long time.
I 100% grant that large organizations by their nature are less efficient than small organizations due to lossy communication. And some companies have a minimum size due to the nature of their work, which places inherent limits on their efficiency. But they're still subject to competitive pricing from other, similarly large companies.
HP started the Grand Experiment two decades ago to determine how long it takes to destroy a large company if every decision is either incompetent or malicious, with little assistance from network effects… and the experiment is still running.
I also think this is why government is the most dangerous power structure (they almost never prune anything and they have theoretical claim to 100% of the country's GDP through taxation. It would be better for us all if they were heavily restricted or just figured out how to prune effectively instead of just raising taxes all the time to support inefficient program spending)
Like, there's a king on the top, he has his board of nobility, VP dukes, knight middle managers and the peasants who do all the work and own nothing. Whatever the king and nobility say is law, they're accountable to nobody (except for the pope/national government).
They are democratic, but usually of the weighted variety. Typically, he who owns more shares has greater say – although occasionally you will see other weighting methods. Government is more likely to consider each individual an equal shareholder, although not always.
Corporations likely also benefit here from the owners generally having more care for the organization and a greater desire to see it succeed. If there is something that needs to change they will work to ensure that it gets changed as soon as a problem is identified. Most government shareholders would rather sit back and just hope that things work out.
Plus there is upwards mobility, whereas in typical feudalism there is none, but it is still funny to think about the suspiciously odd similarities.
It is certainly not suspicious. It's all just people being people. It's questionable if it is even similar and not the exact same thing. Government isn't something magical. It's just a particular kind of business.
Yet for some reason you haven't... You must, deep down, be worried that I will end up taking advantage of you?
> Once you get through the matryoshka doll of managerial layers you eventually hit a politician or committee of politicians who also serve their own interests
Of course, the cool thing about government is that you can literally tar and feather anyone who violates the wishes of the owners. That's usually a lot harder to pull off in a private business.
But you need people who care. That is a rare quality when it comes to the owners of government. It's a miracle when someone shows up just to hire the worker, let alone stay in contact with the worker after they have the job.
Consider Google: they’re highly inefficient in many areas producing entire applications which are written off not long after release and failing to capitalize on areas they had substantial edges in (e.g. AI), (arguably their last successful product launch was in the 2000s) with the net result that they employed a ton of people doing things which were not really tied to satisfied customers. This didn’t matter because they had a few business areas where they had massive profits despite not having a government-enforced monopoly which more than made up for those losses. Most of the tech giants have variations on that theme where they have many people who can report absolutely absurd internal inefficiencies but until that’s broken out on a balance sheet it’ll probably never change.
Government is unique in two ways: the first is that it’s more public (which is good, but e.g. you’d be shocked if Comcast was audited at the same level) but the other is that much of that inefficiency is mandated by the same people who complain about it in public. For example, benefits programs are often structured to require expensive validation processes which cost more than the savings, and there’s intense pressure to contract everything out even though that process requires significant overhead.
this is far too often the case -- i.e., they are the only business providing X in Y region; or while technically not a monopoly their market share is so large it takes a very long time to be displaced (i.e., Google)