See, from my perspective, democracy isn't a very good form of governance, and I don't understand why it should be applied as an end in and of itself in every area of life. This is in relation to co-ops, but also to the recent "democratization" drive in general.

I think it's the least bad form of governance for states because it seems to result in atrocities and genocide less regularly, but when it comes to other systems, (such as businesses) centralization and hierarchies are far more efficient and the decision makers are generally much more informed with the relevant data. With democracy, you spread the decision making across a vast number of under-informed people, which seldom results in superior outcomes.

Sure, incentives matter, I agree with you there. But the incentives aren't corrected when you add a democratic vote of all employees to the mix. The incentive alignment stay the exact same, where everyone is trying to save their own skin even at the expense of others or the firm as a whole. The only thing you've changed is reduce the liklihood of a data-driven decision, and increased the cost, complexity, and response time of dealing with dynamic and rapid changes affecting the organization.

> centralization and hierarchies are far more efficient

Efficient at what? Dictatorships are efficient at maximizing centralization power (and therefore creating wars), not efficient at making citizens happy.

Private companies are efficient at maximizing profit for the shareholders, not efficient at making employees and customers happy.

> With democracy, you spread the decision making across a vast number of under-informed people, which seldom results in superior outcomes.

Wrong. You are trying to applying direct democracy at specific, technical decisions. This would be like passengers on a flight voting on what flap configuration to use.

But democracy is not the Borg and does not automatic mean "everybody decides everything together". Specific knowledge and division of labor can still exists.

> but when it comes to other systems, (such as businesses) centralization and hierarchies are far more efficient and the decision makers are generally much more informed with the relevant data. With democracy, you spread the decision making across a vast number of under-informed people, which seldom results in superior outcomes.

See, I would argue the exact opposite. In a feudal hierarchy, the people making the decisions are usually the ones with the least relevant information -- or in the best case, with the most outdated information.

Hierarchies are great at distributing information downward, but not particularly good at aggregating it upward. This is often for power gradient reasons: people enhance the truth to look better when communicating upwards. Even when people communicate honestly, there's a lot of context and nuance that gets lost as a message travels from person to person.

In an actual democracy, you'll generally find that the people with the best view of the information and consequences of the decision (by virtue of being the ones affected by the decision) are the ones to make that decision.

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Edit: I think I see where the misunderstanding comes from! In your typical corporate hierarchy, the people at the bottom usually don't care about understanding the information that is needed to make a decision -- because they won't be asked to have an input on that decision anyway.

In a sense, the corporate hierarchy is a self-fulfulling prophecy. By dumbing down the role of the employees and preventing them from having any real responsibility, the employees turn into mindless ass-covering robots without responsibility, and then the corporate hierarchist uses the argument that "democracy doesn't work because employees are just mindless robots that cannot take responsibility."

My experience is that when you give people authority over their own selves with a "I dare you to be responsible" what happens is that most people, well, are very responsible.

People get together for common causes and sometimes they need to be reminded what that common cause is, but once they have that in mind, they're fairly good at cooperating productively.

I don't think that giving everyone a vote makes them suddenly driven to inform themselves. For instance, in your average co-op do all the guys on the bottom rung understand what Return on Equity is and its relevance to long term strategy? I can't imagine that they do. But the C-Suite does.

Look at democracy in governments. We have a lot of data about that. Giving everyone a vote certainly doesn't drive them to make informed voting decisions. After all, the average American seems to think that the president controls gas prices.

Yes, in a well-run co-op, all people understand return on equity and other such concepts relevant to long-term strategy. Why? Because they apply such techniques locally (to their department) as well as globally (for the entire company, and in society at large).

You might think my qualification of "well-run" co-op is a bit of a "no true Scotsman", but the fact is that in all forms of business, there are well run ones and badly run ones. A feudal C-suite does not universally understand things like return on equity – in fact, I suspect, many companies are run feudally with a C-suite that has no idea what they are doing.

> See, from my perspective, democracy isn't a very good form of governance, and I don't understand why it should be applied as an end in and of itself in every area of life. This is in relation to co-ops, but also to the recent "democratization" drive in general.

Because of autonomy: The only people making a decision should be the ones effected by it.

In other words, if everyone did the radical thing and asserted that they cannot be threatened until they do something they don't want to do, democracy is the only thing that could possibly work.

Anything that's not democracy ultimately rests on threatening people into compliance. Often implicitly ("be a team player and take this third overtime in the month because I'm under pressure from upper management"), sometimes explicitly ("I call the shots on hiring and firing, so you want to stay on good footing with me").