However, in a vertical system of advancement, where management hires are made from within, the middle ranks will at least have a memory of working on the object-level concerns of the firm.

I think this is part of why the startup nature of tech firms is important, even if all of the important firms are no longer in childhood; it means some fraction of the executive class are people who were around from the beginning, or who built the systems themselves, and so do have the relevant memory.

That said, my sense is that FAANGM are somewhere between 50% and 80% as mazy as corporations as a whole; enough less to be noticeable, but it's still probably the best lens through which to view the situation.

Welcome! :)

• Startups employ a trivial percentage of the workforce and do not contribute much to the economy. Startups that get big occupy more economic space, but by that point they're no longer startups. So the attributes of startup culture are not really relevant to the economy at large.
• It's understood by everyone that being a startup is a kind of  corporate childhood -- romanticised, but temporary. It is implicitly accepted by everyone, including startup founders, that growing up and becoming a mature, "adult" company requires becoming a maze with multiple levels of hierarchy.
• Tech culture is anti-maze only insofar as it consists of startups. All of FAANGM are fully converted to mazes. Consequently, most actual tech workers work within mazes.

Try reading The Refragmentation and see if you still think the same, if you haven't yet.

One choice quote:

But change was coming soon. And when the Duplo economy started to disintegrate, it disintegrated in several different ways at once. Vertically integrated companies literally dis-integrated because it was more efficient to. Incumbents faced new competitors as (a) markets went global and (b) technical innovation started to trump economies of scale, turning size from an asset into a liability. Smaller companies were increasingly able to survive as formerly narrow channels to consumers broadened. Markets themselves started to change faster, as whole new categories of products appeared. And last but not least, the federal government, which had previously smiled upon J. P. Morgan's world as the natural state of things, began to realize it wasn't the last word after all.

What J. P. Morgan was to the horizontal axis, Henry Ford was to the vertical. He wanted to do everything himself. The giant plant he built at River Rouge between 1917 and 1928 literally took in iron ore at one end and sent cars out the other. 100,000 people worked there. At the time it seemed the future. But that is not how car companies operate today. Now much of the design and manufacturing happens in a long supply chain, whose products the car companies ultimately assemble and sell. The reason car companies operate this way is that it works better. Each company in the supply chain focuses on what they know best. And they each have to do it well or they can be swapped out for another supplier.

In other words, it's not just about isolated startups which employ a tiny percentage. According to Paul Graham, across the board, things broke up. Horizontal and vertical integration became less common as the market increased its churn rate. This means smaller organizations doing fewer things well, which is one piece of advice Zvi gives for combating mazes. 

(For those not familiar, "vertical integration" means taking care of more parts of your supply chain, EG if a steel company started directly doing some of the mining which produced its raw materials; and "horizontal integration" means branching out into other businesses (perhaps with some supply chain overlap, but not so directly related).)

Now, obviously, the new companies (FAANGM as you put it) have umbrellad outwards horizontally and in some cases vertically. But these are very new organizations. So unless the rate of mazification has itself increased, they should be at lower maze levels than these older organizations that were around in the 1950s. The rate of mazification may have increased, I'm not saying it hasn't, but that still requires some other driving factor.

• The move away from "company men" was not a move away from large firms, but rather a move away from a vertical system to a stratified one. In the old system (prior to 1970) you could expect to work your entire life for the same company, and middle and upper management was typically promoted from the rank-and-file. In the newer system, middle and upper management are hired from people with MBAs and other credentials, and they move freely between industries. As a consequence, the maze-nature is transmitted quickly from company to company, and to a certain extent all management everywhere is joined in a super-maze, as all management shares the same culture and experiences which is completely separate from the culture and experiences of the workers.
• Actually, this last point deserves more elaboration: according to Zvi, the main thing that mitigates against mazes is direct engagement with the object-level reality. This engagement is present in the rank-and-file, and to a certain extent at the very top, but is absent in the middle. However, in a vertical system of advancement, where management hires are made from within, the middle ranks will at least have a memory of working on the object-level concerns of the firm. The rise of a permanent managerial class means that many middle managers are of a type which has never worked directly on the actual product that their company makes, and whose entire education and experience is in the context of immoral mazes.

This point seems very significant, and pushes more "this is what's really going on" type buttons in my brain.

"Company men" have more cooperative incentives. People who switch careers many times have more adversarial incentives. At the risk of muddying our spatial metaphors, this is vertical vs horizontal transmission [LW · GW] all over again.

It also smacks of the rise of meritocracy. See this book and this podcast episode.

I still have a picture where some key maze factors have reduced over time, but others (including this creation of a separate middle management career track) have increased, plausibly resulting in an overall increase.

An additional, unrelated note: the model of The Dictator's Handbook suggests that incentives push away from the middle, towards total democracy (when there are already a large number of key supporters) or total autocracy (where the number of key supporters approaches one). But don't other models suggest that the middle state of oligarchy is actually the default, and that both democracy and monarchy tend to decay towards oligarchy over time? And aren't examples of this widespread? I notice that I am confused.

Frankly, the argument that there are two attractive states with instability in the middle is a bit fuzzy, and I wouldn't be surprised if it somewhat breaks down with better models.

However, to defend it a little: iirc the book does give historical examples of governments in inbetween states being very unstable. And it sort of makes sense. The larger the number of key supporters, the more competition you have as leader. Democracies are relatively stable because they've settled on a stable way to overturn leaders. Dictatorships are relatively stable because they don't overturn leaders. But somewhere in the middle, you expect leadership to be overturned moderately often, as there is steep competition for the top (just not as steep as in a full blown democracy). Unless the government sets up a regular way for that to happen, you'd expect governmental instability, meaning things can easily transition into a more full-blown democracy or a more full-blown dictatorship.

I might be wrong here, but I have a stereotype of long-lived dictators but short-lived royals. Monarchies of the late middle ages were often somewhere in the middle, with unelected rulers but large courts. (But I'm no historian.)

Congrats on a great first comment! :)

Startups employ a trivial percentage of the workforce and do not contribute much to the economy. Startups that get big occupy more economic space, but by that point they're no longer startups. So the attributes of startup culture are not really relevant to the economy at large.

I wonder what fraction of GDP in 2060 will be accounted for by the work that startups are doing today. US GDP in 1975 was about 9% of what it was in 2015. Do we think that it was the biggest companies that existed in 1975 that were primarily responsible for driving this growth? Or was it startups that grew over time?

I'm willing to accept that the large companies that exist today are primarily responsible for generating the lion's share of GDP and employment today. But it seems plausible that startups are more important to the future economy, and thus to absolute long-term levels of production, than large companies that exist today.

This is just pure speculation; I'd be curious to hear what a real economist had to say about this.

An additional, unrelated note: the model of The Dictator's Handbook suggests that incentives push away from the middle, towards total democracy (when there are already a large number of key supporters) or total autocracy (where the number of key supporters approaches one). But don't other models suggest that the middle state of oligarchy is actually the default, and that both democracy and monarchy tend to decay towards oligarchy over time? And aren't examples of this widespread? I notice that I am confused.

I haven't read The Dictator's Handbook or know what models there are already, but an autocrat could choose to convert to oligarchy to ensure a stable succession plan (assuming they felt no other autocrat could successfully wield power other than them), and a democracy could become an oligarchy if no individual could seize enough power to directly become an autocrat, but a group working together could. Under the right circumstances these incentives could overwhelm the ones going in the opposite direction.

Have you read The Refragmentation? The way I see it, there are many large forces pushing toward fragmentation. If there is large-scale anti-fragmentation happening, I don't understand how it is happening.

Yes, you did mention the Gervais Principle. I found 4 references from Escaping Mazes but the main one seems to be:

The Gervais Principle can be seen as the prequel to Moral Mazes, dealing with life at lower levels of mazes that have to interact with the real world. Mazes need, as several quotes describe, people who keep their heads down and ‘do their job’ with no ambitions for further advancement. Ideally one does this as low on the totem pole as one can stomach and afford, as the life that results is far less odious and taxing. 

Some of the other references in that post related to the "loser" concept.

There were also 3 in the Round Up post, one being (Seems no one has taken up the suggestion):

If one wanted to do a full extension of the project, (17) On The Gervais Principle could be anything up to and including its own sequence. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I consider Gervais Principle and Moral Mazes to be fully compatible, and Gervais Principle has a bunch of stuff that expands upon the model.

Gervais Principle does not have a suggestion for change, as Rao doesn't believe in such things, but there is a clear message: If you have to choose, Be A Loser.

FWIW reading between the lines, I'd say Rao's belief is "If you have to choose, be a sociopath."

I think you probably mention Gervais Principle briefly at some point?

I agree, and worded myself carefully to avoid going into that too much:

and relatively weak in organizations close to the democracy end of the spectrum.

IE, relative to dictatorships.

In the big picture, democracies are way, way better than dictatorships. This doesn't stop democracies from being pretty crappy in a lot of easily identifiable ways.

A problem we currently have is that we don't have a very good picture, at present, of what we could aspire to that's better than democracies.

Futarchy is a start, but it's rather untested, and there are some plausible problems with it.

It does seem like this picture is right. I still feel like I'm lacking some part of the causal story.

Some evidence in support of this hypothesis (and by extension, Zvi's claim that mazes are on the rise) is the prevalence of oligopolies in America and the world. It's hard to buy affordable food without indirectly buying from Nestle for example, and in many of America's food deserts the only nearby place to buy food in the first place is a supermarket that's part of a massive chain. Most Americans have only 1-3 options when it comes to internet service providers, and media companies like Disney routinely buy or merge with their competition (which somewhat prevents startups from being as disruptive to deep hierarchies as they could otherwise be).

My contention (based on The Refragmentation) is that this is much less true than it was in 1950; if not in food, then still, in many other sectors of the market.

But it's possible that this wan only the case for a period around the 90s or something, and the fragmentation has reversed in recent years.

Even when people choose to buy from individuals, they often do so through corporate mediators. For example, to reach an audience, an indie musician will probably upload their music to DistroKid which will allow people to download or stream the music through other corporate platforms; in some sense, this makes the musicians beholden in some way to the whims of DistroKid's and other corporations' whims.

I've never heard of DistroKid and expected you to say BandCamp or SoundCloud. This is minor evidence against the claim. But some variety doesn't mean a lot of variety (IE there could be just three choices).

Still, musicians are far less beholden to these platforms than they were to big record companies of the past, which dictated musical fashion to a far greater degree.

But again, these are newer companies, so we need a different explanation of why they have deeper mazes.

Ridesharing services, Airbnb, and the rise of the "gig economy" fit into the same pattern of individual, atomically voluntary participation at the bottom of what is ultimately a deep hierarchy. 

Definitely agree with this one. The choice  between driving for traditional taxi companies, uber, or lyft isn't much of a choice.

These are newer companies, but in this case there's a ready explanation for why they have deeper mazes: many relatively small and local taxi companies have been replaced by just two ride-share companies. I don't know the statistics, but it would make perfect sense if these companies have deeper mazes simply because they are larger than traditional taxi companies.

The same explanation holds for amazon vs everything it replaces.

Dictator's Handbook addresses the case of Putin. The regime holds elections, but has very effectively stifled free speech, which makes the elections less free. The same is true in China. Granted, this is a significant wrinkle to the formal model. I think the authors are essentially placing these countries further toward the autocratic end of the spectrum based on intuition (IE they admit a wide variety of factors in this judgement, not just a direct analysis of the governmental structure).

Especially now since everybody on the internet can access their own very intense small scale subgroups which usually perfectly conforms to whatever ideology / life style that person wants. Not only does the internet allow people to find their niche interests, it allows them to jump between group cultures relatively easily.

Groups on the internet are not intense small scale subgroups. Joining an organization like Scientology in magnitude more intense then what you get with an internet subgroup. 

Conflicts inside a company are usually much more important for the people inside the company and their career then whatever online discussions arrise.