Final-Fan said:
Speaking of people waiting, did you ever locate the evidence for this claim? |
Sorry, I didn't see your quote. He only outlines his argument in that article, but goes into more detail in the full book version. I never declared the claim as an empirical one, but rather a derived corollary of economic principles. I doubt there has been any proper empirical investigation, because there is no way to control for so many lurking variables.
Here is a more explicit argument made by the libertarian Roderick Long
"
Peter Klein, in “Long on the Corporation,” is skeptical of my argument that in a freed market “firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned).” Klein agrees with me that large corporations benefit in many ways from governmental favoritism, but insists that small firms may benefit just as much:
Klein might well respond that in a freed market, large firms would be forced to become more efficient too. Doubtless they would. But for familiar Misesian-Hayekian-Rothbardian reasons, there are limits to how large such firms can get before the diseconomies of scale overtake the economies and calculational chaos ensues; and absent the ability to socialize the diseconomies (as corporatist policies enable them to do), such firms must then fail. Assuming that such problems could be overcome by sufficiently clever entrepreneurship is comparable to assuming that state-socialist central planning can be made to work by sufficiently wise bureaucrats and sufficiently patriotic citizens.
Incidentally, I offered the comic strip Dilbert not as evidence of the irrationality of corporate hierarchies but as a reminder of it. Those who have worked in such environments know from their own experience how completely clueless the highly paid upper managers tend to be about what is actually happening, and how much of the firm’s success depends on workers simply ignoring the insane directives from above and doing what needs to be done. When those with such experience hear free-market advocates assuring them that their daily experience is just how things would continue to be in a free market, they are likely to conclude “so much the worse for free markets.” But in fact they should conclude that something artificial is propping up these hierarchies; and their own experience with the firm’s actual dependence on workers bypassing such hierarchies should make them skeptical of the conventional wisdom as to the inefficacy of workers’ self-management.
As in the structure of a national economy, so in the structure of the firm, the way an organization really operates is not always reflected in the paper flow charts of the official models. Just as supposed command economies like the Soviet Union have been kept economically afloat mainly by the unacknowledged persistence of black markets, so the success of hierarchical firms is due in large part to the unacknowledged reality, albeit hampered and stunted, of worker’ self-management. And just as the remarkable success of even hampered markets gives us reason to be optimistic about what unhampered markets would achieve, so the ability of workers’ self-management to bring about positive results even when hampered by hierarchy—a reality familiar to millions of people as part of their daily lives, even if it is largely invisible to official “theories of management”—gives us reason to expect still greater successes from workers’ self-management not so hampered."
