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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).

None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other ways, but you cannot know that there are other ways as nothing else has proven to work.

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It's worth pointing out that in many countries small companies under governance models as the ones listed make up a large portion (or even the majority) of the overall GDP. For example in Germany the "Mittelstand" employ 63.7% of all employ and contribute 54,4% of the total economic activity (sorry not sure how that is defined exactly) [1]. So saying they don't work at scale is not quite correct I'd argue, things are definitely more complicated.

[0] https://www.mittelstandsbund.de/themen/internationalisierung...

John Lewis & Partners, an employee-owned cooperative and the largest and most successful high end chain of department stores in the UK, springs to mind as a larger scale success story for alternative models.

I agree, though I suspect viability of models is heavily driven by the economic/regulatory/cultural environment.

In the US, we have:

1. A poor social net, meaning employers need to take on the onus of providing many basic benefits like health care.

2. A political environment that conflates communism/socialism/collectivism, which really muddies the waters around organizations that aren't hierarchical.

3. A work culture that prizes profits over all else. Orgs do not have to be this way, and if you look at expectations/obligations of similar entities in other countries they're expected to balance profitability with things like social welfare.

I think you're right in that within the US, corporations have shown the best ability to scale, but I believe this is a consequence of the economic/regulatory/political environment of the US than inherent superiority of corporate governance.

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