I'm not aware of any relevant research, but to answer the "So what can we do about it?" question I have a wild idea: invert the power structure, with cooperative of workers hiring their managers instead of managers hiring workers. And no, this doesn't automatically lead to the same tree, just inverted, it could form a much flatter structure.
I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.
Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.
This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.
Can this work? No idea.
Like hiring a personal trainer to yell at you to do 5 more pushups or whatever.
Closest thing I can come up with of one party having the authority of paying another party to act as if they were in a position of authority over tre first party.
Don’t stop with work. Governments need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Local first, with taxes flowing there first, and only then do they start to trickle up to the county, state, regional, or federal levels.
Central governments should be emergent properties of local systems working together, not a choke point of all power and taxation revenue. The current system is completely backwards, if democracy and representation are truly the ideals that it embodies
How do we get from here to either new status quo? Bloody revolution. The powers-that-be have made it clear that they will only give up their control over their dead bodies.
Probably need to motivate people to vote in local elections before you can convince them to risk their lives in a bloody struggle.
I haven't studied history or political science, but I suspect that a bunch of cooperating individual local municipalities can as easily lead to war as to federalism.
The Federalist Papers talk a lot about factionalism versus tyranny. On a larger scale, look at how long it took what are now European Union members to stop warring with each other.
The more interesting question is whether you can make higher levels of government depend more explicitly on lower levels, instead of the other way around
Want to find out? Start a new company with this idea. I worked at a tech company where the founders wanted to do things differently so they did. Not exactly what you describe but generally more power to the individuals vs. management. It worked reasonably well until the company grew large, acquired another large company, and was eventually acquired by yet another company.
That is making a big assumption that is completely counterfactual. That a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated per worker/item and agree upon compensation readjustment. Humanity tried that with Gosplan. It worked pretty terribly.
We've had plenty of intelligista think that it would just go perfectly we followed their 'rational' plans. It has been without an exception an exercise in hubris. These 'reformers' keep on stepping on the rake labeled Goodhart's law.
Someone should coin a law that any time something vaguely cooperative or worker-focused is proposed, someone will inevitably reply that it will fail because the Soviet Union did something sort of maybe similar once.
It can work, but ultimately it depends on the culture.
Europe has some corpo-sized co-ops, and while they're not perfect they seem to function better than anything in the US.
It won't work in the US at scale, ever, because US business culture is fundamentally hierarchical, competitive, entitled, selfish, and extractive.
Cooperation at scale is a completely alien concept in the US. Expedient synergies can be workable, but free-wheeling open decision making to benefit customers is only viable in small companies. And often not even then.
So it's dog eat dog. If you're not one of the predators you're the prey.
"Being the boss" of any business that's heading for IPO becomes an attempt to avoid being prey - which implies becoming one of the predators, and being comfortable with that.
If you don't start there your investors will still drag you in that direction, and remove you if you're not willing.
Gonna write a shorter reply because I’m on my phone and frankly too hungry to think, so hopefully it makes sense :-)
TL;DR I agree with you re: US culture being too selfish and independent for that kind of thinking. It’s something that has had my curiosity for awhile and lends to another argument I’ve tried to make - that when people say collectivist economic systems won’t work because humans are “inherently selfish,” I think they’re confusing human nature with cultural conditioning. I don’t pretend to know how to change that cultural conditioning, but I think it’s narrow minded to assume that because one’s culture is perhaps selfish, then humans are as well.
If people keep suggesting solutions that were tried and failed of course other people will point that out.
1930-s Gosplan, 1950-s Gosplan, OGAS, Cybersyn, they all failed. Come up with something new maybe?
Cybersyn was an experiment and we don't really know if it would have worked or not because the USA arranged for a military coup to destroy it ...
My point is that they’re not the same thing and it’s an attempt to link two things that are loosely related, at best.
“Come up with something new maybe?” Is a trite attempt at belittling a conversation that is seeking knowledge and frankly just annoying.
It’s a desperate attempt by people who understand that identifying huge problems in the easy part. So much of life is just people thinking that by identifying the problem they’re 99% of the way to fixing it.
But apply this to something you understand in detail, unlike a whole society. “That guy has a bad heart, better fix it!” That’s something that doesn’t need to be said, never mind repeated like a solution to a hard problem.
Rationalists struggle to understand just how irrational people are at scale. In fact they think up these big utopian plans as a way to reinforce the notion that we’re just one good rationalist away from paradise.
Edit spelling
"a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team" seems... impossible.
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