Economies of Scale

= the myth that bigger is better and more efficient

Discussion

Dave Pollard on the Power of Scaling

From http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/03/04.html#a2113:

"The corporations would have you believe that the combination promises "economies of scale" -- that redundant positions can be eliminated, duplicate processes eliminated, volume discounts obtained from suppliers, and efficiencies obtained by combining operations. Anyone who has ever been through a combination can tell you that this almost never occurs. In fact, costs rise after the combination because of diseconomies of scale -- the larger the organization, the greater the hierarchy, the more the bureaucracy, and the more infrastructure is needed to keep it all connected. Small is agile. Large is clumsy. There are no efficiencies of scale. So why do these transactions still occur?

In a word, power. Consolidation isn't about the consolidation of resources, it's about the consolidation of power.

Size gives you four types of power:

Power over regulators: Oligopolies of three or four companies controlling an industry (and this is the case in most industries now -- check out the wonderful blog Oligopoly Watch if you doubt me) have the power (and money) to lobby governments to deregulate their industries, provide them with massive subsidies, introduce 'free' trade agreements to expand the oligopoly's reach globally, and introduce and enforce intellectual property laws that inhibit innovation and block new competitors from entering the market. We used to have 'anti-combines' laws to prevent this market distortion but the oligopolies have effectively had all such regulations eliminated, neutered, or rendered unenforceable. So now governments are effectively in the back pockets of the corporatist oligopolies. That's power, and it brings with it enormous profit.

Power over consumers: Oligopolies can and do fix prices so that consumers have no choice but to pay these prices or do without. Those that try to find workarounds like file-sharing to circumvent oligopoly price-gouging are threatened with lawsuits and jail by the huge armies of lawyers that the oligopolies employ. These oligopolies also control the media and blanket the airwaves with their propaganda. The law of 'supply and demand' is hence subverted as the suppliers control the market.

Power over suppliers: Oligopolies can and do bully suppliers to sell to them at prices just high enough to keep them solvent and dependent on the oligopolies (this type of oligopoly, more correctly called an oligopsony, essentially dictates ever-decreasing prices they will pay to manufacturers or wholesalers, Ã la Wal-Mart, since there are no significant alternative ways for manufacturers or wholesalers to get their products to the consumer marketplace). If you're both a supplier and a customer of oligopolies (like small farmers for example) you get squeezed at both ends. They have all the power.

Power over employees: Oligopolies can and do bully employees to work for minimal wages and benefits or have their jobs offshored to struggling nations whose people are so desperate they'll work for almost nothing. And why are the people of struggling nations so desperate? Because these same oligopolies work in cahoots with despots and corrupt officials in those nations to steal the land and natural wealth of those nations and leave behind nothing but pollution, waste and destitution. Although the inequality between rich and poor has never been higher, the power of 'organized' labour has never been lower. The power rests with the oligopolies." (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/03/04.html#a2113)

Kevin Carson

See the entry on Diseconomies of Scale

Felix Stalder on Clay Shirky's arguments

Felix Stalder:

" There are limits to the scale particular forms of organisation can handle efficiently. Ever since the publication of Roland Coase's seminal article ‘The Nature of the Firm’ in 1937, economists and organisational theorists have been analysing the ‘Coasian ceiling’. It indicates the maximum size an organisation can grow to before the costs of managing its internal complexity rise beyond the gains the increased size can offer. At that point, it becomes more efficient to acquire a resource externally (e.g. to buy it) than to produce it internally. This has to do with the relative transaction costs generated by each way of securing that resource. If these costs decline in general (e.g. due to new communication technologies and management techniques) two things can take place. On the one hand, the ceiling rises, meaning large firms can grow even larger without becoming inefficient. On the other hand, small firms are becoming more competitive because they can handle the complexities of larger markets. This decline in transaction costs is a key element in the organisational transformations of the last three decades, creating today's environment where very large global players and relatively small companies can compete in global markets. Yet, a moderate decline does not affect the basic structure of production as being organised through firms and markets.

In 2002, Yochai Benkler was the first to argue that production was no longer bound to the old dichotomy between firms and markets. Rather, a third mode of production had emerged which he called ‘commons-based peer production’.1 Here, the central mode of coordination was neither command (as it is inside the firm) nor price (as it is in the market) but self-assigned volunteer contributions to a common pool of resources. This new mode of production, Benkler points out, relies on the dramatic decline in transaction costs made possible by the internet. Shirky develops this idea into a different direction, by introducing the concept of the ‘Coasian floor’.

Organised efforts underneath this floor are, as Shirky writes,

‘valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing’.

Until recently, life underneath that floor was necessarily small scale because scaling up required building up an organisation and this was prohibitively expensive. Now, and this is Shirky's central claim, even large group efforts are no longer dependent on the existence of a formal organisation with its overheads. Or, as he memorably puts it, ‘we are used to a world where little things happen for love, and big things happen for money. ... Now, though, we can do big things for love’. (http://www.metamute.org/en/content/analysis_without_analysis)