Low Cost of Technology and High Overhead of Corporations

People can organize to do things with a lot of flexibility and with almost no overhead today. The countless layers of management in corporate organizations are incapable of competing with the decision making of a handful of people on any given project.

Technology, specifically telecommunications technology like the suite of hardware and software that makes the internet work, could more rapidly make corporate methods, management and executives obsolete than it might make fast food workers obsolete.

The economy of the US is based on corporate bodies organizing people on relatively large scales to do things. The larger scale organizing is convenient for financial bodies that can extract large amounts of wealth via interest.  It's also convenient for political bodies that can extract taxes through corporate tax farming bureaucracy.

Corporations define the economy and economic terms of day to day life. To obsolete corporations, requires political changes and a shift in thinking by masses of people. The Internet is probably propelling that right now and we're in the very early stages of the changes that will come. As stated in earlier posts, this scale of change is on par with the Reformation. In fact, it's going to depose the order that the Reformation helped usher in.

Yale/British East India Company Connection

Elihu Yale

The British East India company seems to be, in many ways, the corner stone of modernity. Elihu Yale coughed up some in-kind donations from the wealth he diverted from his employer over his career to help found Yale University. If you follow the biographical links in that Wikipedia article, you'll rattle around the east coast establishment for a while.

We're pretty oblivious today of the role of for profit corporate entities played in founding the "colonies", which in retrospect look like modern property development deals. A couple of generations later, the east coast establishment colonized the interior of the country using similar schemes. (See Connecticut Western Reserve)

It's interesting to wonder if there's any corporate entity that continued from the BEIC and remains today, and if the corporate descendants of it are shaped by their ancestor. Most notably is the CIA epithet "The Company" a reference to it? Seems plausible as it uses similar methods for similar purposes.

Trees! Part Two

Just as certain groups of animals and plants co-evolved, people co-evolved with their environments. I started elaborating this idea in an old post. (Trees!) Are arbitrary belief systems compatible with any given environment? Similarly, are widely held beliefs really just an expression of genetics?

The map above is a micro-version of the physical geography/religion map in the first "Trees!" post. It shows Northeast Ohio household incomes and biomass. There are typically many more trees and plants in the areas where there are wealthier people. At least in the case, above, it seems to track household income more reliably than just population density.

There's not really data readily available to look at ethnicity on a small scale, except the phony racial categories of the US census. On the basis of that data, there's no obvious consistent relationship between biomass and genetics.

Anyway, it's an interesting thing to keep looking at.