# What percent of people work in moral mazes?

*Epistemic status: A quick* [*Fact Post*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sdx6A6yLByRRs8iLY/fact-posts-how-and-why) *on moral mazes. This is me trying to get my hands on some data and think through stuff, not meant as a definitive reference.*

I wanted a sense of the proportion of people who work in moral mazes. 

The middle manager hell hypothesis says "the more layers of middle management you get, the more your company will be Goodharty, deceptive, and optimized for upper management political games" (among other things). 

Whether you buy the middle-manager-hell-hypothesis, I wanted to figure out how many people work in a highly hierarchal org. 

This blogpost was a originally going to be a short aside in [Recursive Middle Manager Hell](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pHfPvb4JMhGDr4B7n/recursive-middle-manager-hell), where I claimed "People in modern society are more likely to work in moral mazes. Large companies tend to become moral mazes, company size is probably heavy-tail distributed, therefore probably most employee-hours are spent working in companies with lots of employees."

But, is that true? Size of companies is gonna be heavy-tailed, but, number of small companies is also probably heavy-tailed, and I wasn't sure how the numbers checked out. This seemed like a good opportunity for me to practice being more numerically literate and getting in contact with some facts-on-the-ground about company size.

So:

I found this [webpage](https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/) claiming to have data for number of US companies for each size in 2022. Unfortunately, it only buckets up to "1000+" employees. I have a feeling that heavy tails are pretty important here.

| Employees Per Org | Number of orgs |
| --- | --- |
| **1 - 4 employees** | 12,737,231 |
| **5 - 9 employees** | 1,913,721 |
| **10 - 19 employees** | 817,604 |
| **20 - 49 employees** | 414,381 |
| **50 - 99 employees** | 154,255 |
| **100 - 249 employees** | 89,365 |
| **250 - 499 employees** | 33,467 |
| **500 - 999 employees** | 19,058 |
| **1,000+ employees** | 24,036 |

(It also includes a "uncoded companies" of which there are 1,771,725. But, as a first approximation, the coded companies are hopefully representative as a proportion of the US population)

I have a feeling heavy tailed orgs are pretty important here. As a quick workaround I found [this page](https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-of-employees/) listing the very top companies. I asked ChatGPT to reformat the list so I could paste it into a spreadsheet. It... seemed to only go down to "Walgreens" before it seemed just start making stuff up. (I'm guessing it ran out of working memory to think?). But there were only a few more US companies anyway.

\[*Fake edit*: oh goddammit the fr is maybe world data instead of US data, which would be fine except I assumed I was looking at US data and so filtered the next table for US companies only. I was gonna timebox this post to "today" so I'm going to ship it with the current numbers, and then later either me or Some Other Enterprising Amateur Scholar can try to get a more apples-to-apples set of numbers and see if the trends are roughly the same. Walmart and Amazon are still the largest companies even when not filtering for US, and there's only 5 more companies between UPS and Amazon in size\]

| Company | Employees |
| --- | --- |
| Walmart | 2,300,000 |
| Amazon | 1,544,000 |
| United Parcel Service | 500,000 |
| Kroger | 500,000 |
| Home Depot | 500,000 |
| Target | 450,000 |
| Starbucks | 402,000 |
| Berkshire Hathaway | 372,000 |
| UnitedHealth | 350,000 |
| FedEx | 345,000 |
| Cognizant Technology Solutions | 341,300 |
| TJX Companies | 340,000 |
| Pepsico | 309,000 |
| Costco | 304,000 |
| Lowe's Companies | 300,000 |
| Concentrix | 290,000 |
| JPMorgan Chase | 288,474 |
| IBM | 282,100 |
| Jabil | 250,000 |
| Aramark | 248,300 |
| Wells Fargo | 239,209 |
| Citigroup | 238,000 |
| Microsoft | 221,000 |
| CVS Health | 216,000 |
| Bank of America | 213,000 |
| HCA Healthcare | 204,000 |
| Walgreens Boots Alliance | 200,000 |

I'm not quite sure what a serious scholar would do with this, but for immediate future I through this into one table. I collapsed everything between UPS and Walgreens Boots into a "200-500k" bucket, and treated Walmart and Amazon as two additional outliers counted separately.

To wrangle the buckets into a point-estimate of employees, I took the geometric mean of the upper and lower bounds of each bucket. I'm not sure that was the right assumption, and especially for the 1000+ bucket I could imagine all kinds of things turning out to be a better approximation if I found more data. But, it seemed like an okay first pass guess.

I assume each manager can manager 10 people, so the threshold for each additional level of hierarchy is roughly:

| Levels of Hierarchy | Employees |
| --- | --- |
| 1   | 1   |
| 2   | 11  |
| 3   | 111 |
| 4   | 1,111 |
| 5   | 11,111 |
| 6   | 111,111 |
| 7   | 1,111,111 |
| 8   | 11,111,111 |

So, that gets us this:

| Employees Per Org | Number of orgs | Employees per org (geomean) | Levels of Hierarchy | Total employees | Percent population |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 - 4 employees | 12,737,231 | 2   | 1   | 25,474,462 | 5.5% |
| 5 - 9 employees | 1,913,721 | 7   | 1   | 12,837,631 | 2.8% |
| 10 - 19 employees | 817,604 | 14  | 2   | 11,269,893 | 2.4% |
| 20 - 49 employees | 414,381 | 31  | 3   | 12,972,177 | 2.8% |
| 50 - 99 employees | 154,255 | 70  | 3   | 10,852,801 | 2.3% |
| 100 - 249 employees | 89,365 | 158 | 3   | 14,101,559 | 3.0% |
| 250 - 499 employees | 33,467 | 353 | 3   | 11,820,533 | 2.5% |
| 500 - 999 employees | 19,058 | 707 | 3   | 13,469,301 | 2.9% |
| 1,000-199k employees | 24,036 | 14,142 | 5   | 339,919,522 | **73.2%** |
| 200k - 500k employees | 25  | 316,228 | 6   | 7,905,694 | 1.7% |
| Amazon Specifically | 1   | 1,544,000 | 8   | 1,544,000 | 0.3% |
| Walmart Specifically | 1   | 2,300,000 | 8   | 2,300,000 | 0.5% |

So... this says 73% of people are in the approximately "1000+" (but less than the top US companies) bucket. And this is sort of annoying because that was definitely the most poorly defined bucket. It contains a wide range of numbers of employees and I'm not at all confident my geometric mean estimate is reasonable. 

The 1000+ cluster would range from 3.5ish layers of hierarchy, up to 6.5ish. The Immoral Mazes theory suggest than things Start Getting Mazey around 3 layers of hierarchy, and are Solidly Mazey by the top you have 5 layers (where there's at least one middle-management layer that never is directly connected with object-level reality).

This rough pass seems to support the original "most people work in a moral maze" claim, but I think I may have basically made simplifying assumptions that "made that true."

Shrug?