Everybody knows what needs to be done. Parenthood needs to be sustainable for the parents. There’s just no political will to implement a policy that will only start paying off in 20+ years. Every politician kicks the can down the road, or implements half-hearted policies.
Edit: Just realised I posted this to the wrong instance comm 😅
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.
So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn’t work well. It’s more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]
That’s untrue? The big ones also go bankrupt. It’s a risk shared by every company, to keep adapting as the world changes.
Even the VOC, at a point the largest company in the world with more assets than most countries, folded.
The likelihood of the company going bankrupt decreases with its size. It’s a gradient, not categories, so saying “big companies can also go bankrupt” does not falsify what I said at all. (Note that I outright listed some of the reasons why this risk decreases.)
And bigger companies are clearly in a better position to adapt to changes than smaller ones, so your argument is only reinforcing my point.
You’re now aware that the VOC would look like an ant in comparison with modern megacorporations. For example, Walmart is around 350 times larger than the VOC was in its prime*.
Also note how poor of an example the Dutch East India Company is, given that it was effectively a vassal state of the Dutch government, not an independent group like the megacorpos of today. And it didn’t simply go “bankrupt”, it lost a literal war against the United Kingdom (the fourth Anglo-Dutch War).
*Note: around 1670 the VOC had 50k workers (source), and its annual operating profit was estimated to be equivalent to US$ 80 millions (source). In the meantime, Walmart controls 2.1 million workers³ and its operating income for 2025 is around US$ 29 billions (source for both).
How so? The replacement rate is shorter than in recorded history (1)
It seems that the older corporations had a very hard time adapting to new technology, to the point that they’ve been replaced by new smaller ones that outpaced them in only 30 years?
It also went bankrupt.
Of course you have to place it in historixal context: both in world population and in respect to other contemporary companies.
A bigger business:
Data contradicting my claim would show that smaller businesses have a similar or better rate of survival in comparison with bigger businesses. Your link does not show that, it does not even compare smaller vs. bigger businesses, as it focuses solely on the S&P 500 bankruptcy over time.
Note that your link confirms what I said here, as it shows big companies being eaten by biggER ones:
And the war totally had nothing to do with this, right. Nope, the VOC “just” went bankrupt, the UK snatching its stuff was totally irrelevant, and the VOC’s fate can be totally generalised for the sake of your “ackshyually, big biz also go bankrupt, see VOC.” /s
If you did the maths beforehand, to know if your argument is sensible or bullshit (it’s the later), you’d know that Walmart is ~twice the size of the VOC in number of workers, even when normalised for the world pop. (500M back then.)
But odds are you ain’t bringing context up because the context would be relevant here; you’re only grasping at straws.
There was barely any global market back then, almost all companies would stick to their country of origin. The VOC was the anomaly, being the first multinational and being rather government-like. You got an elephant and 503499398988989387349 ants.
Nowadays a Walmart or Unilever or Alphabet or Apple or Nestlé is not an exception. Those companies seised the economic activity of the world. You got a handful of blue whales, and most ants got the DDT.
inb4 “then this shows that VOC was hueeeg for other companies lol lmao” - refer to what I said about it being extremely government-like, and fighting a literal government.
Given that you brought up exactly zero relevant counterpoints, I’m not wasting my time further with this discussion - it’s simply unproductive.
It does, even if you fail to see it. In only 30 years, those small garage sized startups outpaced century old megacorporations.
According to the logic: “Larger companies can better adapt, has more capital, can survive temporary losses, etc”, that should not be possible. We should be conversing on ExxonBook. Yet the examples are right there.