4000 years old and it's already the Fifth Dynasty. In another professional life I was a classicist, and I thought I dealt with old stuff there, but Egypt is just so impossibly ancient it makes the Greeks look like a bunch of Johnny Come Latelies. Deep time...
Forgetting about the Minonian and Cycladic civilizations? Greek mainland didn't develop until later, naturally, but it started in the thousands of little islands, the Aegean archipelago, and the big one, Crete. The Minonians had established trade routes with the Egyptians during the 5th dynasty, IIRC. DNA evidence revealed they were there as early as 9000 B.C., with cultural influence between the Minonians and Egyptians going both ways.
It's all about the Big Rivers - Nile, Euphrates, Huang He... they fed complex human civilizations thousands of years before the rise of Mediterranean tribes.
That's simplified history at best. Greek texts were much (much) better preserved in the Byzantine empire, and were lost to the West mostly because people forgot Greek and copies decayed.
Read Coase's book on the theory of the firm. The short answer is yes, firms are just like gosplan. We put up with them because they reduced transaction costs.
Your comment assumes that Trump/Brexit/Le Pen voters are trying to "do something" with their votes. What if they're just trying to do as much damage as possible, knowing the system has it out for them?
It was 3/5, not 2/3, to break a filibuster, and the use of filibusters had been getting to unprecedented levels. The argument above was that constitutional change should be hard I.e. require a supermajority. The Senate rules as followed recently have been requiring a supermajority for ANY change. That is unhealthy.
> Don't corporations have growth targets and multi-year plans? Don't they (mostly) have a top-down management structure, where freedom of action and collective intelligence are constrained the further you get from the Central Committee (also known as the C-suite)?
Yes. IDK if Hayek addresses this or not, but Coase has a very good (and short) little book on the theory of the firm where he goes into exactly that. Basically, there are transaction costs to going to the market. So sometimes it's worthwhile to lose market feedback and centrally plan things.
