Human commerce is one of the most awesome organic creations of society and is truly a thing of beauty.
Just look around the room you’re in and notice all of the hundreds of different products. Virtually all of those represents an entirely different industry with tons & tons of businesses producing within that industry throughout the world. You could spend a lifetime figuring out all the expertises & nuances of just one of these industries and there are hundreds of them represented in just that one single room you’re in. From the paint on the walls, to your computer & cell phone, your clothes, the light bulbs, the food, the windows, the door knobs, and on, and on.
Now, for each separate product of the hundreds surrounding you right now, each one is made up of dozens to hundreds of component products, of which virtually all of those represents an entirely different industry with tons & tons of businesses producing within that industry throughout the world. So the amount of products represented by just what’s around you in one room right now is not in the hundreds, but rather exponential in the tens of thousands or more, in just one room belonging to one single person. Think of your entire household. Think of the entire households of your friends & family. How about your entire city? That’s still an extremely small fraction of all of human commerce.
Guess what, it doesn’t stop there, because commerce is made up of more than just products. Commerce also includes services, which are often times invisible to the final products & experiences purchased. For example, there may be dozens of component products within one piece of your clothing, or thousands of component products within your cell phone. However, think about the process of producing these things. What produces these products? Companies do. What distributes these products? Companies do. What retails & delivers these products to buyers? Companies do.
Beyond production tools, companies are a collection of tons of services & functions of labor. Just a tiny home business utilizes such things as accounting, legal, sales, marketing, shipping, internet, transportation, and on, and on. I probably don’t have to tell you how each one of these is usually made up of an assembly of dozens to hundreds of component services. Try to think of the entire overall process & individual component processes of a business being established, producing something, managing itself, evolving itself, and continuously getting products & services delivered to end buyers around the world. And that’s just talking small businesses. Don’t even get me started on describing enterprise corporations or governments. Of course, there are a ton more services that you buy as a consumer too, from education, to plumbing, hair cuts, entertainment, child birth, banking, and on, and on. Each one of these consumer services is also being backed by one of those companies operating on top of tons of products & services itself.
Think about how humans have gone from having nothing but raw nature, to tens of billions of us continuously producing, owning, & operating all of this stuff, and where nobody knows much about hardly any of it, yet can enjoy the end benefits of virtually all of it. What’s more is that virtually all of it arises naturally & organically from people serving their own self-interested motivations, not by way of some central design or command. This means that nobody planned this grand system of commerce as it came into being over thousands of years. It was simply an emergent property of the natural forces of individual people pursuing their own self-interest.
Commerce has naturally become an organism & institution onto it’s own, especially with technological innovation as added rocket fuel. Commerce is one of the most vital human institutions to our post-tribal existence. The world would fall apart without it. In fact, if much of commerce was largely a result of central planning, even with good intentions, then the world would still fall apart. Because no subset of human minds can dynamically account for all of the naturally arising needs, activity, resources, flows, transactions, innovation, etc that organically makes up human commerce.
This is why I say that human commerce has become a beautiful system of exponential distributed benefit.
