A few thoughts on economy, I'll have to organize it someday. Now it's a bit like what would come out of my head if someone hit it with an idea-paddle.

The economy of numbers is not "real" in itself, but it is built around the real one, the economy of objects. Money is a delayed gratification device. It allows for delaying the pleasure derived from work, like a freezer allows for storing food almost indefinetly. It's also abstract enough to be easily exchangable for goods, but is should not be mistaken for a good itself. Money is not a product nor service, it does not fulfill any needs it inself. It is the representation of power.

If money is not a real entity, but rather the representation of power (wealth) derived from real-world processes, it shouldn't be looked at as an mathematical idea. It's growth has less to do with accounting and banking, and more with the actual processes that emerge and grow. If a company's shares' value is on the rise, it means — in theory at least — that the company produced a profit from it's operations. A profit is the difference between the cost of manufacturing a product or performing a service, and it's price to the receiving party. It is actually not as crucial to the company's existance as we are led to believe. If the income covers the costs of it's operations: raw materials, wages, research, marketing, it is enough for the company to continue it's existance.

The most of the unnecessary cost in running a company is in the management — that including human resources, accounting, and public relations. Management is redundant and should be minimised in the future companies. A company shouldn't have it's own group of people that glue together different parts of the company. A big company of the today's economy should actually be divided into small, highly specialized entities that take minimal management and can be easily replaced by a different company to create a more efficient string of processes that result in a consumer product.

The current trend to integrate as many companies into a single entity is sustained by high taxes. The higher the taxes, the more efficient it is to avoid them by minimizing the outflow of the capital. Basicly, if the money stays within the company, there's no taxes to pay. The downside is the need for extensive management, caused by the lack of competition. If within the company there's a department that deals with presenting products to the general populace, it is the only one that the company uses. Using any other, outside department would prove inefficient, as the company wouldn't only have to pay the outside entity to provide the required services, but it would also have to sustain it's now useless, internal structure.

That is why extensive outsourcing is the way of a more efficient economy. Outsourcing is obviously not a new idea, there's not a single company that is fully self-sufficient. Even the largest companies still purchase electricity, communications, information (including the news services it's management uses) from other, smaller ones.

Most products are cheaper to produce in large quantities, but mass production tends to lead to lower quality products. When something is mass-produced, the focus moves from individual consumer appease to the companies that are more bent on how much of it's price they will have to include, and less on how good the product actually is. There's more chance of an error in something complicated, which is why the simpler the product, the more efficient it's mass production can be.

Therefore all production should be done by small, specialized companies that try to minimize the individual cost by maximizing the output. It's how the power plants and telecoms work: they offer a product/service that is easy to produce, adaptable, and uncomplicated. Their problem, the one they will have to overcome in the future is their size. If a company is bigger than a dozen people it needs structure, which leads to management, which is an unnecessary expense.

This is not to say that the today's companies should promptly dissolve into a myriad of smaller ones. The point of having small companies is that their ownership would be spread throughout the society, as each company should have only it's most direct profit in mind. Any human-created market strategy will always result in inefficiency, as it's goal — to create greater profit — will be easier to achieve.