In an organization where everyone is equal, adding a new person to the org doesn’t benefit the people who are already in it. Let’s say you have a coop bagel shop- is there any particular reason to want to cut your own paychecks until you have saved up enough to open another one? Or let’s say you live in an egalitarian, peaceful country. Is there any reason to want to invade your neighbors and annex territory? No.
But, if you put one person in charge, then suddenly you have a person in a position of authority with a vested interest in expanding the franchise, since he gets to skim off the labor of everyone underneath him. In a stroke, you’ve invented empire, war, and capitalism. Come back in a hundred years and the organizations that expanded the most are also the most heirarchical.
I don’t think this is a good thing, by the way, just a historical factor to be aware of.
Huh? If the additional person can bring more value to the cooperative than they consume (which you would generally hope to be true for most hires), then it will be to your benefit. Yes, more slices need to be cut, but the cake is bigger. For example, a marketing expert that can increase customers for the single bagel shop by 10%, but their salary only costs 1%.
So how do you explain the exact opposite actually working in the wild?
Over the past couple hundred years, almost all full communist/socialist governments have failed, while market-based capitalistic ones have pulled billions out of abject poverty.
In an organization where everyone is equal, adding a new person to the org doesn’t benefit the people who are already in it. Let’s say you have a coop bagel shop- is there any particular reason to want to cut your own paychecks until you have saved up enough to open another one? Or let’s say you live in an egalitarian, peaceful country. Is there any reason to want to invade your neighbors and annex territory? No.
But, if you put one person in charge, then suddenly you have a person in a position of authority with a vested interest in expanding the franchise, since he gets to skim off the labor of everyone underneath him. In a stroke, you’ve invented empire, war, and capitalism. Come back in a hundred years and the organizations that expanded the most are also the most heirarchical.
I don’t think this is a good thing, by the way, just a historical factor to be aware of.