The point is not to limit the size of the industry. It is to limit the size of a company.
Think of a oil refinery as a monolith, and that such a mandate would enforce that you'd have to build the whole system a set of independent microservices. The industry as a whole would still employ a large number of people, but now they would be forced to coordinate through specific interfaces (the smaller business units) instead of centralizing under a larger corporation.
Like the Amazon’s “API” mandate, as famously described by Steve Yegge:
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Huh, here’s an idea: Maybe Jeff Bezos did what he did because he was fearing just such a goverment-mandated breakup, and wanted Amazon to be prepared for it?
I know you meant a general idea, but for oil refineries in particular, and probably a bunch of others, this sounds disastrously bad from a safety perspective. A lot of accidents that are tremendously costly in terms of human lives and health, equipment destroyed, and operational uptime eventually trace back to poor communication between groups. There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when. I can't help but think that if you intentionally made inter-department communication worse, it would result in a huge increase in the number of disasters.
> There needs to be some top-level department with stop-work authority over everything to coordinate who's doing what maintenance when, equipment replacements and switchovers, and the overall plan for what's being produced when.
I find it very hard to believe that this can not be automated to the point of requiring much more than a dozen controllers (4 groups of 3 people, on a 12-on/36-off work schedule). And there is nothing stopping this "top-level" department to be a company in itself.
But anyway, let's say that I'm underestimating the amount of human brainpower that is needed to get this work done safely. Not to be a Luddite, but shouldn't we be asking ourselves if there really is any type of (isolated) economical activity that is so fundamental for us that can only be done with more than 150 people involved?
It's not like we can not refine oil with less than 150 people. It's just that we can not do it at the scale and efficiency that we are used to, right? Instead of having one "giant" refinery that requires thousands of people, perhaps the limitation would force us to have smaller plants spread out around the world, or to have the downstream industries actually doing the refinement themselves, etc.
So, how about instead of looking for maximizing the efficient usage of resources in order to keep the economy growing at an accelerated pace, we start to focus on a constant growth rate and better distribution?
Capitalism would not allow such a company to exists. There would be too much bottlenecks and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing scenario and the end product would be more expensive compared to a company with no such limitation. Buyers would prefer buying the product at much cheaper rates and then just transporting it to their locations.
I could easily argue the opposite: in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size, they would be forced to become a lot more efficient in their communication and they would be a lot more open and agile.
Also, a lot of the work done by people in Big Corp is something that is not outsourced merely because they don't want to let their competitors to have access it. A lot of these redundancies would be eliminated and replaced by smaller units that can serve multiple companies. Companies that have internal "business systems" developers would simply get rid of that and looking into third-party SaaS and/or open source solutions that could be used, etc.
> in a scenario where all companies are reduced in size
What does all companies mean, are you proposing the entire world follow this approach or just the US. If its just the US then other refineries would just offer cheaper oil and US consumers would buy it from overseas while the US refining goes bankrupt.
1) The price of oil (and basically everything downstream of crude) has little to do with the cost to produce it, and a lot more to do with current market conditions. So even if their productions costs were (slightly) higher, I don't see why a local, smaller, refinery would have too much trouble to keep themselves profitable even if they had to have lower margins to stay competitive.
2) Smaller companies would mean that you'd be consuming a lot less primary resources and your business relationships would be on a much more local scale. You wouldn't be getting a networks of branded gas stations that receive their gas from the same mega-distributor, you'd be more likely than many different gas station owners, each of them too small to be interesting to a foreign refinery.
3) Even if that is not enough and "US refining goes bankrupt"... so what? Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
> Why do Americans need to have their own refining industry, if they can be served by others?
Looks like you did not think it through.
You need to have energy independence. When you depend on other countries, those countries can use your weakness to get better deals or control you. If there is a pandemic and all the supply chains breakdown your people can still survive.
How "energy independent" is Switzerland? Singapore? The UK?
You are too deep in "Big State" thinking. Forget about that.
> If there is a pandemic and all the supply chains breakdown.
Under a localist model, your people can still survive because they do not depend on global supply chain and can still have a functioning economy.
What I am asking you is to imagine a less radical version of an Amish community. Less focus on economic output and more focus on resiliency. Try to keep your economy as local as possible and do not over-generalize. Do not think of industries as something that has "strategic value" and instead let them develop as much as it is required to fulfill the needs of your citizens. This way, your community will have plenty of redundancy and no one will be at the mercy of any other external entity.
You are too deep in "Fantasyland" thinking. Forget about that.
> How "energy independent" is Switzerland? Singapore? The UK?
Exactly, atleast the UK depends on middle east and Russia which funds their murderous regimes. You should be supporting human rights not murdering innocents.
> your people can still survive
Tell that to the people who died from Covid because they could not get masks which were all manufactured in China.
> Try to keep your economy as local as possible and do not over-generalize.
I think you getting confused with your own talking points, in the previous comment you wanted want the US to be served by others and now you are saying keep the economy local.
What I am asking you is to live in reality and not live in fantasy land, you sound exactly like a politician who declares war on drugs. The current globalized world cannot just cannot function with your fantasy 150 people limit.
You getting confused with your own talking points is one the proof that your limit does not work.
I misspoke. I meant to say "do not over-specialize".
> in the previous comment you wanted want the US to be served by others
No, read again with the whole context: what I said was that the focus should be on keeping the industry local, on a smaller scale and more worried about robustness than profitability. Then I said that "even if after that they are still being out-competed, it doesn't mean that they all is lost".
The point was that plenty of countries can be successful even if they are not 100% self-sufficient about key resources. I am not advocating the end of trade. I am advocating for smaller/stronger communities and stronger/more explicit interfaces between them.
> You should be supporting human rights not murdering innocents.
Please stop with this absurd rhetoric. Not only is BS, it could easily be turned on you ("So, you buy things from China? This means that you support the genocide of Uyghurs!")
> The current globalized world cannot just cannot function with your fantasy 150 people limit.
First, this "current globalized world" is precisely the thing that is so full of systemic issues that we should be working to avoid. In a less-globalized and not hyperconnected world, Covid would not even be a thing, so the whole "people died of Covid because they didn't have masks" is complete rhetorical bullshit .
Second, there is no limit on people. The only limit is about the size of a single corporation. I don't know what is so hard about it to understand. You keep mischaracterizing the argument to the point that it is making clear you are not interested in a good-faith conversation, which should be a signal that I am done here.
You say misspoke, I say you got confused with your own talking points.
> it doesn't mean that they all is lost"
I dont know if you understand capitalism but out competed companies eventually run out of money and get bought out by the more successful one. I think that is the context which you dont undestand.
> it could easily be turned on you
Its not rhetoric, I am being serious, I would love to buy things made locally but that is just not possible with your 150 people limit. You want things to be less efficient and more expensive.
> In a less-globalized and not hyperconnected world,
Again you sound like a politician who declares war on drugs, your ideas sound great on paper but the globalized genie is out now, its not going anywhere for a long time.
> Second, there is no limit on people.
You are getting confused again with your talking points, you are the one who is advocating for 150 people.
> I don't know what is so hard about it to understand.
and yet who are the one getting confused or "misspsoke"
The only thing I misspoke was that I said "over-generalize" when I meant "over-specialize". Everything else (I think) was okay.
> You want things to be less efficient and more expensive.
There is a difference between wanting things to be more expensive and accepting that this may happen as part of the trade-off being made. Specially so if the idea is that this type of policy could potentially eliminate the concentration of power on the hands of a few conglomerates and create an incentive for automation and to eliminate "bullshit jobs".
> I would love to buy things made locally but that is just not possible with your 150 people limit
Why? Go to any farmers market, is there any step on the production chain that requires 150 people? Do you think (e.g) a municipal ISP to serve 10-20k people can't be operated with less than 150 people? Can't we buy fabric and materials (from small scale producers) and have a small textile manufacturing co-op making clothes?
Also, consider that we are used to having products being completely assembled, but there is nothing stopping companies in a "human scale" economy to work as provider of components that get to be assembled by the final consumer. These components could be made by separate companies. So, instead of having "Google Assistant vs Amazon Echo vs Apple Siri", we would pick-and-choose different speakers, different software providers, different enclosures, etc. The hard work here would be one of coordination - i.e, all these companies and providers would benefit if they worked on a "AI speaker device" common standard - but once that is set in place it reduce the average company headcount. The same logic could be potentially applied to any big consumer industry: clothing, furniture, home appliances...
Finally, let's talk about the software industry. Take any big product from the big companies and you can bet that you can find a small ISV (with certainly less than 150 people) who can deliver and profitably operate an equivalent service. Even though Gmail and Outlook dominate the mass market, smaller email providers still exist and they haven't "ran out of money" and got bought out by the more successful ones. We don't need the big players to serve the population, we could have more of these ISVs acting independently (*). These ISVs would likely invest in opensource as a way to outsource as much as they can to keep their overhead low, which would lead to a even more pulverized industry.
> your ideas sound great on paper but the globalized genie is out now
Again, why? There is no magical force stopping us from preferring local products. There is nothing forcing us to consume indiscriminately. I get that "the system" is too big for any of us and that our individual actions will barely have any impact. But feeling apathetic is not a justification to just accept things as they are. You can not say "I would love to buy things locally" and blame "Capitalism" when you end up buying things at a big-box store.
(*) "Oh, but Gmail/Facebook/etc are free to the user, people won't be willing to pay for it!" Well, the argument could be that these people would either have to find a smaller provider willing to do the service for them (their employer, some non-commercial community, the tech savvy family member who wants to self-host?), or they would indeed have to learn about TANSTAAFL.
Think of a oil refinery as a monolith, and that such a mandate would enforce that you'd have to build the whole system a set of independent microservices. The industry as a whole would still employ a large number of people, but now they would be forced to coordinate through specific interfaces (the smaller business units) instead of centralizing under a larger corporation.