[lbo-talk] socially irresponsible investment

[tully]

On Saturday 16 April 2005 09:33 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
>tully wrote:
>>Free market chaos from mom and pop markets?
>
>In the macroeconomic sense, yes. That's one of the reasons the 19th
>century economy was so unstable. When there are a lot of small
>actors, there are more links between firms, meaning more opportunity
>for something to go wrong - a missed payment, for example, that can
>cascade through the system. And less financial strength among the
>small individual actors increases the likelihood that something can
>go wrong. Large firms internalize a lot of these relations, meaning
>less possibility of something going wrong.

But isn't this more than offset by the problems that result when a big 
operation does make (or experience) a change?  Don't those 
repercussions have the potential for far greater devastation because 
of the wider ties that are established to a single point?  Wouldn't a 
distributed set of ties to smaller more redundant operations have the 
ability to pick of the slack, to act as a buffer to such massive 
changes to the status quo?  

--tully