One can not manage a thousand as efficiently as a thousand can manage a thousand.

In 1980, a wonderful new mall was built in a large metropolitan city near the intersection of three major highways.  Business was good and the mall was very successful.  However, within ten years a few violent crimes occurred at the mall and received a lot of media attention.  The mall owners did little to ease citizen concerns about mall security because they knew that statistically the crime rate was much less than the other malls.  Business began to decline and the tenants demanded lower rents.  But the owners of the mall felt this was still the premier mall in the city and deserving of the highest rental rates.  Gradually retailers left, including some anchor stores.  The mall owners believed this was occurring due to an economic recession and that when the recovery occurred the stores would come back.  The mall owners were willing to receive no little income from much of the mall for a few years in order to keep their rent rates high and reclaim new tenants at high rates in years to come.  That gamble did not pay off for the mall owners, the last tenants pulled out, and the once spectacular mall with the prime location was raised to the ground just 25 years after its opening.

The mall owners made an investment, made a lot of profit for a few years, lost money for a few years, and eventually sold off the remains.  To the mall owners it was very much like investing in a stock that has good years and bad years and that you eventually sell for little gain.  But to the thousands of people the mall employed and the hundreds of thousands of people that the mall served the loss was much greater.  Had the mall managers lived closer to the mall, perhaps they would have taken better care of the investment.  If the mall managers saw the mall as affecting people and more than just a monetary investment perhaps they would have managed the investment better.  If the mall managers managed only this mall, and not hundreds of malls, perhaps they would have put more effort into making the investment work.  In some cases, perhaps most cases, when the ownership of many assets are placed in the hands of a few, those assets will not be managed efficiently.