 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're here today to talk about governing the cooperative firm. And I want to begin by going back to one of the basic issues in the course, which is that if cooperation, worker cooperation is so good, why don't we see more of it? People who like cooperation will often turn around and say, well, the problem is that there's cooperators lack access to finance. They can't borrow the money to build up a firm. Yeah, generally true, but you think over time, a little bit, a little bit, you think that there'd be more cooperation if that was the only problem. There's a problem of entrepreneurship. The types of people who could develop a cooperative, who have the energy to go out and do it, will generally go out and develop a capitalist firm where they can get more of the profits for themselves, could be. There's another set of issues. That cooperation requires time and emotional energy. This has to go back to a great English writer from the turn of the century who said, he would like to be a socialist, but he can't do it because there are not enough evenings. Socialism requires too many meetings. Cooperation requires meetings. You have to sit down and discuss with your fellow workers how you're going to do things. We manage the economics department at UMass Amherst. We have faculty meetings at least every month. And sometimes they're tendentious and complicated and difficult and we all walk out feeling mad at each other, yuck. Sometimes we feel uplifted and good about it. Amherst still has a town meeting form of government. Town meeting is a problem because so many people don't want to serve on it, don't want to go to it because it takes so long. You spend hours and hours every night for weeks discussing the budget. Sometimes you want to dictate it instead. Do you really? Do you really want somebody telling you what to do? The thing about cooperation is it could be like the town of Amherst, where we have some really conflicting interests. There are some people who want one thing and other people want others. Some people care a lot about the schools because they have children. Other people should care about the schools because we all depend on children, but they're older and they don't have children and they just care about taxes. Conflict generates more time and more emotional hurt as you fight. You don't care about my children, you horrible person. You don't care about me staying in my home, you horrible person. You can have that type of conflict in a work of cooperative and the cooperative will break down. Either it won't be able to govern itself or some of the people will walk out. Either way, problems. The greater the heterogeneity of interests, the more difficult it is to manage a cooperative. More difficult it is to manage a democracy. In cooperatives, there is inherent conflict of interest based on people's job tenure, how long they've been there, how old they are. The older they are, the closer they are to being at a point where they may actually want to retire. That's a natural inherent issue. If you're a 50-year-old, you're in a different position than a 25-year-old. I was just talking to Dan, the video guy earlier, about his job search and about I suggest he not care about pensions. When I was his age, I didn't care about pensions. At my age, pensions are important. Inherent conflict between young workers in a cooperative who want profits to be kept in a more liquid form to finance a pension. Inherent conflicts. How do you resolve them? How much time did they take? That may be the fundamental problem facing cooperation, but it's not something unique to cooperation. These are problems fundamental to democracy. We have to deal with these problems all the time in our lives. Yes, there's an alternative. The alternative is to have a dictator telling us what to do. If we don't want to have a dictator, we have to come up with another way to do it. This is what Alexis de Tocqueville addressed in the 1830s when he came to America and it's still the problem we have for democracy in America and for worker cooperatives. Thank you and have a nice day. Bye-bye.