Re:Employees: looking for “the great boss who cares about th...
by js8 on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @08:02AM
(#11166366)
I suspect there are several reasons:
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.
1. Cooperatives don't have strong incentives to grow, because growing typically means more people and that means sharing of power, accordingly. Their growth is probably limited by trust.
2. When someone has the ability to start the company, they won't probably want to do it as a cooperative. It's harder to start a good cooperative than just a company. This is a corollary of 1.
3. It's much harder to raise capital for a cooperative because of possibly misaligned incentives. Even though capitalist's companies suffer from principal agent problem too, this is enough to dissuade many potential investors. Since cooperatives are not very common, this is a chicken-egg problem.
4. As someone else mentioned, democracies tend to be pretty conservative. This can be good in the long term, but makes them vulnerable to well-planned short term attacks from the outside.