I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.
After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.
The Corporate System is actually collapsing.
Just because the share is rising doesn't mean those enterprises aren't becoming less viable or accommodating.
I'm not saying they are or aren't, only that that data is pertinent.
No, corporations are actually getting more powerful.
they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work.
They're as efficient as they've ever been.
The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do)
No, we don't have human-level AI yet.
Convexity will end the Corporate System for good.
There are always diminishing returns, if you go far enough. Sufficiently rapid innovation may push everyone leftwards on the logistic skill-level curve for a while, but it's only ever temporary.
[Citation needed]
I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen.
Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environments, and will continue to act as rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barriers to entry can be constructed.
Sure, coroporations are a terrible way of turning human labor into product work, but they are an optimal way of moving wealth from "consumers" to owners of capital.
"large businesses only employ about 38 percent of the private sector workforce while small businesses employ 53 percent of the workforce. In fact, over 99 percent of employing organizations are small businesses and more than 95 percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees"
Affordable health care is pretty much the last major benefit that puts a large corporate employer at an advantage to a small business or self-employed status. With health exchanges and affordable (?) health care kicking in next year the parent assertion might be correct.
(Caveat: I may be misreading some of this.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#Em...
We can't know, because we can't go back in time, but I feel like those coal miners would have been just as productive (if not moreso) if they were better compensated for their work.
that was a point of information, not a point of interest.
Nor mine, not in the short term.
Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those are bad. Anyway, those will be around for a long time. The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing. That's dying off, but not immediately and not without a fight.
Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding that to lobby government for corporate-friendly business environment, and continue to be rent-seeking cartels in any industry where a barrier to entry can be constructed.
The shift is gradual but real. From 1945 to 2008, people believed in corporations. Even the more liberal people of the time, like Bill Clinton, were pro-corporate, insofar as "pro-business" meant pro-corporate and the idea that one can support capitalism but despise corporations (mainstream high-IQ libertarianism, now) was at the extreme fringe.
Now, even our right-wing (Tea Party) is anti-corporate. (They hate government more, and they're deeply wrongheaded, but many of them are anti-corporate; I'll give them that.) It took a while, but people have started to lose faith in their corporate masters. That is the first step (the first of many).
Sure, there's still a lot of regulatory corruption and rent-seeking and extreme inefficiency, and it won't die off tomorrow, but I have no doubt that it's on its way down, and probably in the next couple of decades.
In 1999, if you said that the world was run by evil people or idiots and that Corporate America was a travesty, you'd be seen as a bitter loser and laughed off the table-- even in liberal circles. Post-2008, no one argues against that viewpoint.
So the Corporate System has lost the people's faith, and it has also lost its ability to provide full employment. Those are two major changes. It won't be overthrown next month, and its demise will be painful (because its owners will externalize much of the pain to the middle and lower classes) but it will happen.
It's a hall of mirrors. You look closely and suddenly "the right wing" is "The Tea Party", and "The Tea Party" is "anti-corporate", or "In 1999, if you said the world was run by evil people [...] you'd be seen as a bitter loser". But worse than the occasional verifiably false premise is the fact that the whole comment is slippery, written deliberately to avoid being pinned down and interrogated.
You're right: I'm definitely pooping on the comment. Can't claim the high ground there at all.
It could be written more simply. You're not wrong, of course, but I've seen you take-down posts like that a couple of times now, so a comment seemed fair. (I realize it's not far off from how you normally write, but the effect is different in a take-down post.) IMHO of course.
Though, for what it's worth: I used "factoid" in the sense of "concept related as a fact that probably isn't a fact".
It was really nice of you to take the time to write that. Thanks again.
This has never been the case. Large corporations do not employ the majority of people.
http://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.htm
Firms with 250+ employees have been slightly >50% since 1996.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewfs.nr0.htm
37.4% of employees are at firms of 1000+, 6.8% are 500-999, 7.2% are 250-499.
So either the numbers I remembered were a bit outdated, or were using a higher cutoff than 250 (probably 500, since I remember it being not that much less than 50% working at "large" corporations).
The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- but there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build?
Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle...
Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have generational creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That is generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines.
The generational cultural poverty, coupled with actual material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.