You had a lot of sources in this post. Half of them are only about ownership, because that's easy to measure. Do you believe them? If not, why cite them? If so, then why not talk about mere ownership?
But the other half are even less believable because control isn't measureable. Good governance is good. But how can you even classify governance as democratic? Are the Southwest town halls democratic? Or are they classified as democratic because the writer like the company?
Your previous post mentioned a lot of pitfalls, but I don't think the United example fell into any of them. And I don't think they are important. Most employee stock is voting shares, but there are so few votes it hardly matters. What is important the large number of small decisions.
You start by talking about democratic governance, but then switch to firm ownership. Employee ownership is easy to measure, but does it actually result in information flows? Some people insist that there is a big difference.
To see the difference between merely giving stock and letting workers shape their destiny, look at the airline industry. In return for lower wages in 1994, United Airlines pilots and mechanics got more than half the company’s stock. But life inside the cockpit and at loading ramps barely changed. By contrast, Southwest Airlines employees own only about 11% of the company’s stock, but the company works to encourage and implement workers’ suggestions, in part through town hall-style forums with top management. While there are other important differences between the carriers, workplace culture is a big reason United posted record losses last year while Southwest made a healthy profit–as it has for 29 years.
Southwest had good governance. Did this have any connection to distributed equity? How?
Anyhow, from a theoretical perspective, owning 1/1000 of the firm while having 1/1000 of the responsibility is pretty big free rider problem. If you can make your small part of the firm more efficient, it won't show up in your equity. But just being an employee is theoretically a big incentive to keep the firm surviving. The 1/1000 of the equity seems negligible compared to that.
There is value figuring out what is going on in America. But since the same thing is going on elsewhere, answers unique to America are incorrect.
Focusing on the US seems like a mistake, since Dominic Cummings worked in the UK, yet the situation seems to be substantially worse, despite, eg, there being no separation of powers.
How to find workers that will do with Dominic Cummings wants? He found it quite easy to recruit from people already employed by the Department. He didn't need a lot. He couldn't manage a lot. If the masses had ignored him, it would have been fine, but they actively sabotaged. And lots of people he found productive left because it was too difficult.
When you step into a liquor store, the majority of the alcohol you see will likely be sold to people whose health it’s significantly harming
This does not follow and is probably not true. Heavy drinkers tend to consume low-profit cheap forms, often highly concentrated. Most of visible inventory is advertising diversity and trying to get moderate drinkers to buy something more expensive.
I'm not sure how relevant this is to the rest of the argument, but I see people assert that this is true and relevant all the time and I must rebut.
The default on Polymarket is no expiration. It is only after actively choosing to have an expiration date that it goes to 1 day. I suspect that is so short that it encourages people not to choose it. Similarly, the default with Manifold is not expiring. But if you do click to change, it offers 5 options from immediate to 1 month.
Both sites encourage market orders over limit orders. Polymarket makes limit orders visible but not default. Manifold buries them under "advanced." So the people Joern profited off of were sophisticated enough to choose the "advanced" options but not sophisticated enough to choose good expiration dates.
Encouraging people to use limit orders is a step in the direction of a smoother market. Limit orders with 1 month expiration are somewhat like a sequence of monthly auctions. But they may be harder to understand and require more UI work.
1That makes it sound like there's a lot of room for big improvements from small changes. Like just add expiration dates to limit orders. Then have the UI suggest reasonable dates. Maybe 1/2 of the time remaining. In an absolute sense that is a very long time, but surely it is better for almost all users than the status quo of all of the time remaining.
To what extent do these arguments apply to the stock market? Has any stock market tried this? Why didn't the people complaining about HFT who founded IEX do this? Is this legal (eg, compliant with NBBO)? Even if it isn't legal in America, lots of countries have their own stock markets and could try this or even impose it.
Until quite recently, modification of dogs was to make them specialized workers. The teacup poodle was created as a pet, but the standard poodle was created for duck hunting. That doesn't seem a terrible fate.
I don't see how usefulness explains which animals were bred frivolously. I guess the long experience breeding dogs for work could turn into breeding dogs for appearance, but in the 19th century there was frivolous breeding of pigeons, which had previously been bred for food.
The Scottish fold and (American) Persian cat were directly selected for appearance and their health problems are directly related to that feature. Maine coons seem to be natural ("landrace"). Their sixth toes and health problems might be the result of a population bottleneck 400 years ago, or the rapid selection for a new environment, but they were brought for work. I don't know about their friendliness. It makes sense that someone would breed for that for pets, but I don't think that's what happened. Rag dolls going limp when held seems disturbing to me. The one I met seemed more frozen with fear than happy with humans.