It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

> There's too much group-think in the executive class.

I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets.

> we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed

We give the military far too much money in the USA.

The funniest thing is that somehow the executive class is even more out of touch than they used to be.

At least before there was a certain common baseline derived from everyone watching the same news and reading the same press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to have a full company of tech workers despising the current plan and yet that person being constantly reinforced by linkedin and chatgpt.

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

>It is a weird form of centralized planning [...]

It's a form of "centralized planning", except it's not centralized at all.

This is why I think taxes on the very wealthy should be so high that billionaires can't happen. The usual reasons are either about raising revenue or are vague ideas about inequality. It doesn't raise enough revenue to matter, and inequality is a fairly weak justification by itself.

But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and when someone accumulates enough of it to be able to personally shake entire industries, it's too much.

If you get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich you are -- because that's how assets work -- it turns into an exponential, runs away, and concentrates power until something breaks.

how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy.

The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources.

When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

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