
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - thunk
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/
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randomwalker
I just want to point out that this guy is also the author of The Gervais
Principle[1], a 4-part saga that offers an incisive, brilliant and
depressingly accurate analysis of the human psyche as it applies to workers in
a corporation. It's probably the most awesome thing I've ever read in blog
format, and I'm looking forward to reading this essay.

It looks like the site is supported by donations, which I just did.

[1] <http://www.google.com/search?q=the+gervais+principle>

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JoachimSchipper
Venkatesh is entirely supported by book sales (Tempo) and blog donations: he
doesn't have regular income nowadays.

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davidw
Interesting. He's certainly well read, but the conclusion sort of fizzles in
my opinion.

> How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions.
> All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and
> relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global
> economy.

He seems to be pointing at a future where transaction costs between
individuals are lower, so there's less need to organize people into Large
Organizations. (See: Coase's Nature of the Firm:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm> )

Fair enough, but I don't see companies going away, as you still need someplace
to invest capital/pool resources to be spent, to create large-scale projects,
whether they're created by employees or by freelancers.

Sort of on the same topic, this book talks about economic organizational
models in the west vs the middle east, and how the former pulled ahead of the
latter in part due to better institutions:

<http://t.co/vumpwKy>

It's a bit long-winded at times, and repeats itself, but the subject is, IMO,
interesting.

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quadhome
> Fair enough, but I don't see companies going away, as you still need
> someplace to invest capital/pool resources to be spent, to create large-
> scale projects, whether they're created by employees or by freelancers.

I think he's saying those sorts of investments will be fewer and further
between.

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wazoox
<rant>These little ramblings on the future of corporations in 2100 is no
better than discussions around the number of angels atop a pin head. All of
these economic references without any ground in the reality of a finite world
annoy me to no end. It's time both for academics and bloggers together to get
in touch with reality : the planet is finite. Resources are limited. We'll be
running out of them fast. All common -- and many less common, like in this
article -- economic theories written by people ignoring the second law of
thermodynamics (or as a physicist said "[these economists] can't even change a
tyre") are bunk. Yes, I think that only hard-core environmentalists are
looking in the right direction, and we're a bunch of fools. The Titanic is
sinking but the orchestra's still playing. </rant>

tl;dr: I'm extremely pessimistic about the future. This sort of happy, dreamy
nonsense gets on my nerves.

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vorg
> the planet is finite. Resources are limited. We'll be running out of them
> fast.

Our earth is just one of billions of planets in our galaxy alone.

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scott_s
Science fiction author Charles Stross on why we're unlikely to ever leave our
solar system: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html)

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vorg
I read the article but not the comments, so perhaps I'm repeating something
there...

> a closed-circuit life support system capable of keeping a human occupant
> alive indefinitely, for many years at a stretch, with zero failures and
> losses, and capable where necessary of providing medical intervention. Let's
> throw in a willing astronaut (the fool!) and stick them inside this
> assembly. It's going to be pretty boring in there, but I think we can
> conceive of our minimal manned interstellar mission as being about the size
> and mass of a Mercury capsule

Perhaps the most effective means of interstellar travel is bases within
asteroids, not spaceships. Future humans could build habitats inside
asteroids, then with a few nudges upset the entire gravitational equilibrium
of the asteroid belt, slinging some asteroids out of the solar system. We're
probably able to compute the most optimum way of doing this within the next
century, and humans are more likely to survive interstellar trips buried
inside asteroids than in a spaceship's husk.

> you're not going to get any news back from the other end in less than
> decades.

> transporting our Mercury-capsule sized expedition to Proxima Centauri in
> less than a lifetime.

Why not one-way trips? The new civilizations might consider themselves new
"countries", unworthy of interference by Earth in their internal affairs.

I should add we have another billion or so years of life left in our Sun,
before we really need to leave our solar system: that gives us enough time to
learn how to do one-way interstellar trips. I concede that in the meantime,
Earth's population is likely to suddenly drop a few times. The projected 9
billion inhabitants in year 2050 seems unstable, though new food/fuel
technology may come before then.

As for mining the asteroids, perhaps it'll be done by Earth-based avatars.
Certainly the Moon can be mined that way, with its 1 second response time, but
Mars would be more of a challenge, requiring machine-human cooperation in the
processing.

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zipdog
Some good points but the idea of Peak Attention seems to be conflated with
focus. Its one thing to have the captive attention of a tv audience, but its a
completely different thing for a team of people to have joint focus on a task.
The later is what gets things done, the former is just a way of passing time
for those without the motivation to entertain themselves.

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hessenwolf
Culture, policitics, war and business = decreasing strength order? Isn't this
almost the opposite of the Maslow hierarchy, with food, safety, belonging and
esteem, self-actualizing?

He is only a few paragraphs in and he has drawn a causation diagram backwards.

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davidw
I think he's saying that it can be harder to change cultures than it is to
say, simply invade a country. The US rolled into Iraq with no problems at all,
but how long would it take to truly change the people and culture? Would it
even be possible?

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pavlov
Caesar's invasion of Gaul changed the people and culture. Modern France still
acknowledges a direct cultural link with the Roman era, while there's barely
anything remaining of the Celts who were invaded.

Granted, it took hundreds of years. Present-day imperialists lack that kind of
patience.

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TheloniusPhunk
That's a good point. Invading Gaul et al. was probably more lucrative than
invading a country like Afghanistan as the Romans were more obviously and
unabashedly imperialistic and that war had to do with territorial expansion.

The invasion of Gaul is more akin to the way (relatively) early Americans
forced out the Native Americans, and their culture certainly changed/doesn't
really exist anymore. WWII Japan and Nazi Germany are examples of a places
where a short war changed the culture.

The reason it won't work any more is because that style of 'total war' appears
to have gone out of style. Probably a good thing, though Fareed Zakaria was on
the Daily Show the other night talking about how one reason America has been
so powerful is because Europe was leveled in WWII and the US had the industry
to rebuild.

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quadhome
> The reason it won't work any more is because that style of 'total war'
> appears to have gone out of style.

The effect of nukes not withstanding, I think 66 years is too short of a
history to say that "total war" has gone out of fashion.

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hessenwolf
I agree it is much too short, but I think we need a good solid baby boom
before we will take arms in the near future.

I was also thinking that economics and not war are behind the spread of the
English language. You could argue that movies (culture) also cause people to
learn a language, but the movies are coming from the place that has the money
and industry to make them.

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hootmon
Pure Korpo Fascist apologist hack at work here...

Kind of skipped over the whole 'US was founded on the premise of keeping
corporations from having citizenship rights'.

Korps in decline, I think not, rights of real people in decline, rights of
corporations on the continued rise.

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hapless
Section I (EIC) was amusing. I didn't make it all the way through Section II
(Taylorism). Citing such unreliable institutions as paragons of business
virtue destroys your credibility.

The American railroads that conquered the west were grossly inefficient. Their
"success" was sustained almost entirely by malfeasance, corruption, and the
unchecked abuse of eminent domain.

Taylor was a fraud at best and a liar at worst. Taylorism and its cronies are
possibly the greatest curse on our age.

