Edson White said in 1924 that big business was already decentralizing because more people were buying corporate shares. As ownership spread, so did voting power, scattering authority across thousands of shareholders instead of a few owners.
Recently, I bumped into this quote by Edson White: Big business is rapidly becoming decentralized, and it desires to be. And what I found amazing about this quote is the date. That's a quote from 1924. What? It's almost 100 years old, right? So this conversation is not new. The decentralization of big business was happening because more and more people were becoming shareholders. More and more people in the general population were investing a part of their disposable income into shares, and by that we were dispersing authority by having more and more people who could potentially vote.
