I'm talking about the U.S. economy of the '50s and '60s, when General Motors was the very model of a modern major company. In those days progressive thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith used to ridicule economists who still believed what they had learned from Paul Samuelson's textbook, which was that free markets could be counted on to match supply and demand. After all, business itself was clearly moving away from markets and toward planning. More and more of the economy was dominated by large corporations, and those corporations didn't place much faith in the invisible hand. As technology grew more complex, as big corporations grew ever bigger, as computers made it easier to impose centralized control, it was clear to smart people that the economy would bear ever less resemblance to the competitive system described in obsolete economics textbooks.
Large companies account for a steadily declining share of employment and value added.
Moreover, even within corporations there is a growing tendency to rely on individual initiative, on independent profit centers free to take risks and do it their way. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. It's sort of like the difference between your father's bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company's pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.