A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 (2011)
ribbonfarm.com
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I am a splitter. It turns out that every interpretation produced by lumpers depends on oversimplifying or flattening the past in ways that are demonstrably wrong. Lumpers say that that doesn’t invalidate their larger point. The details are just the decorative garnish, not the fundamental point. It is self-evident, to me, that that is wrong. But I’m a splitter, not a lumper. I didn’t choose to be a splitter after carefully considering the alternative(s: it’s a continuum, of course, more than a binary state). Splitting comes natural to me. The details really do matter. You can’t inductively build useful models of human being on top of incorrect or inaccurate observations of humans being in the world.
How much lumping, or splitting, one can tolerate is one of those mysterious facts about yourself that are black boxed even to your inspection. De gustibus non est disputandum, I suppose.
The challenge with theories of human societies and economies is that their enormous complexity, constant flux and the inability of the observer to truly distance themselves from the object of study make any proposed explanatory frameworks very sketchy.
The value in learning history comes not from the knowledge you acquire about humans, but from the wisdom you gain about human being.
What is knowledge versus wisdom, that debate has gone on for thousands of years. We keep chipping away at wisdom and it turns into knowledge. The wise used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Wisdom seems more like a veneer, or a feeling, that can be dissected until we uncover reality.
There have been some some frameworks that were found to be wrong. That doesn't mean we don't continue to try to understand why something happened. And hopefully that helps us 'have wisdom' for the future.
If I try to understand why something happened, I might call it a 'framework', and you might call it 'Wisdom'. I think this discussion has too many loosely defined terms that is leading to the confusion.
Or, at least, the wise said they think the sun revolves around the Earth.
On thinking about this more. I wonder what wisdom is. If it is something in the mind like a feeling that is difficult to express. Sometimes then it is expressed in some 'wu-wu' type terms. It seem ethereal. And what models, frameworks, etc... are doing, is to try and get wisdom out of the head and onto paper. And perhaps then it is easier to share the wisdom, if it can be boiled down to simpler terms. This boiling down of concepts, lumping, is done in all other fields, it is just very difficult in History so maybe there are far more misses, than hits.
I would make one counter point to Lumpers/Splitters. If you have all the details, you can loose the ability to use that data. It is a problem in all fields, millions of data points can obfuscate what is happening, a nice trend line is over-simplified, but lets you make some judgments.
Have you seen all of the books on WW2 or Civil War, do you need to read them all and know all details before you can make any judgments, or form any opinions. Or can you read an 'overview' that leaves out the details but gives the broad strokes.
Guess I've seen too many people go down the 'details' rabbit whole, and in the end not produce anything but more details that aren't adding.
But, have to caveat. I think it is very valuable that people are out there doing detailed research, so there are details available. Just think there is also a lot of value in finding patterns. And I'd disagree that history is too complex to find patterns.
Same old problem. The more simplified the model, the more it could be inaccurate, but the more detailed the model, then it is overfit and not providing any information. Do you need to know what was going through the minds of every civil war solder at Gettysburg, every movement, to know who won?
> And I'd disagree that history is too complex to find patterns.
I think it depends on what you mean by “patterns.” if you mean patterns in the sense that physical theories detect patterns that observe formulaic relationships, then I strongly disagree. But of course human history involves human beings. We come with a fairly standard (in a statistical sense) set of equipment. Of course there will be similarities. Just not ones that can be used to generalize across all history.
However, that aside, I wanted to point out that you were actually doing three different things“ below, though arguing for one position:
> If you have all the details, you can loose the ability to use that data.
> Have you seen all of the books on WW2 or Civil War, do you need to read them all and know all details before you can make any judgments, or form any opinions.
> Do you need to know what was going through the minds of every civil war solder at Gettysburg, every movement, to know who won?
First, it’s not really clear what it means to use “data” about history. If you mean make predictions, I think you’re doomed, but that’s because the predictive enterprise itself is doomed when it comes to historical understanding.
Second, I would not consider forming a judgment or opinion about something in history to be in the same class as lumping. So that’s orthogonal to what we’re focused on here. Now, it is the case that, as you split more, dive more into details, your judgments may change. They become more refined and less certain. But part of learning history just is forming judgments about things that have happened and then refining them. The danger of lumping, of course is that you stop refining because you’re so focused on the abstract patterns you think you detect. And the real value of learning history is just in the refining!
Third, who won is a data point itself, so no, you don’t even need to know how Gettysburg unfolded at all to know who won.
Sure, if there was time to study all of history, that would be great. But sometimes you need summaries to provide context around the subject being deep dived, or more finely split. It isn't possible to split ad infinitum.
In the end all history is summary and interpretations. Some people take it too far, which I think you said, it is a sliding scale. It goes back and forth doesn't it, some people split and split, and find a lot of details, and then wrap it up and write a summary.
For formulas. I tend to think the understanding of the human animal will be cracked eventually. Being complex doesn't mean it cant be done. And we'll be able to find more 'formulaic' models of groups, and perhaps apply to history. But of course, it is speculation right now.
Of course, this 'speculative' history has been going on for hundreds of years. Aren't there historians just to study past historians that themselves tried to find 'models' of history. I'd say lumping has been part of the process for a long time.
But to come full circle, you need details from which to lump, so some groups go out finding details, and others try to put them back together again. It isn't all facts, it is to find out why things happened, and really that takes putting things back together.
Of course we are talking about a couple made up words lump/split, and really each encompass entire fields. Perhaps it is bad example since the linked article lumps too much? So I'm in position of defending lumping, when it started with a not very good example.
Somehow, at some point in the past that I haven't been able to precisely identify, everyone decided that corporations were legitimate "things", and started acting as if they should be. And I'm not sure why. We see practically nothing either in common law or in various national constitutions that authorize governments to create the damned things. It's quite bizarre, and more than a little dangerous.
Stross likens them to gigantic, slow-as-dirt artificial intelligences designed explicitly with psychopathic motives. And most of the time it feels wrong to try to dispute that.
Related, think how a town incorporates in order to form their own local government.
No corporation is authorized to do that in any circumstances at all.
While I certainly invite criticism of these entities, bad criticism benefits them.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist:
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious.
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
And it is not an analogy, a corporation is not like a government, it is a government. Often what we think of a corporation is a for profit endeavor(but it does not have to be) but not all for profit endeavors are corporations. So what differentiates a corporation from other for profit endeavors. A corporation has license to exists and operate under it's under it's rules instead of existing and operating under a single person. a government.
That's the definition of State. Governments are just administrative bodies.
If there were a state without any government (some lawless anarchy), the idea that the "state" could still have a monopoly on violence is laughably asinine.
You must be from some European country where "government" means something like "Congressional session" or whatever. I have little interest in wading through all that semantic nonsense.
Corporate personhood happened because of one law reporter.[1] It's a very strange story.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....
The conclusion it reaches is...also not exactly in detail what's happened lately, but also directionally correct. Big Tech's growth hit a cap. There is growing interest in better information sources, and a sense of the Internet reclaiming its roots. There are plenty of "indie creators" of various stripes, many just hanging on and struggling against Big Tech platforms, but also many finding a better space than within industry. The last few years had interruptions to Taylorist time, which sent people on radically different trajectories.
I still think there's something in it, even if the grand statement being made is the kind of thing that needs its own book.
They certainly didn’t have much to do with the political system of the United States. English Republicanism and Whig liberalism is where the roots of American democracy lay.
If some corporations of the time were not multinational, they wouldn't have acted outside their own homeland.
Are you saying there were no investors or shareholders involved in colonizing the Amrericas?
Quite simply today's multinationals are direct descendants of the ones of old.
I naturally assume it can be easily seen that today's global economic and political system is fundamentally different than it was just a few years ago.
What alternative motivation would be an accurate explanation for the organizations founding the overseas colonies?
And who else would have been capable at the time?