Friday, March 6, 2009

Stalinist companies



Chris Dillow puts forward the amusing idea that large companies are more like Stalinist centrally-planned economies than we think. He quips that RBS does seem to have been one based on a sort of cult of personality and a suppression of dissent! Of course, there was not the risk to life or limb as there was under Stalinism.

But the point he is making is an interesting one. Large firms try to co-ordinate their internal activities. In that way, they are like planners trying to control and co-ordinate an economy. This could, arguably, cause the same problems for a company that can emerge in a planned economy - misaligned incentives, misallocation of resources, ignoring people at the bottom of the hierachy etc. As such, it is interesting that more "pro-market" commentators don't notice this and suggest that businesses are getting too big for their own good. There is the idea of diseconomies of scale, after all.

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