If you mean a "join-stock company", large corporations are probably less than a thousand years old. The first were alledgely shipping combinations organized in London and Dutch coffeehouses, but I have also read suggestions that Medieval Japan and China may have had something like a modern joint-stock corporation.
But what Graham means, is corporation in it's true sense of the word as a generic "body". The Catholic Church, Roman and Ottoman Empires, Hanseatic League, various hybrid religous orders such as the Teutonic Order and etc, can all be considered corporations. And in general, larger was better, with occasional shifts and retreats.
I think car manufacturing can be done by much smaller organizations. I suspect that pharmaceutical companies will have to change a lot; for all they spend on research, they simply don't prolong human life enough to justify being 14% of the economy.
Regarding the pharmaceutical industry, there's a lot of redundancy. As soon as one company develops a blockbuster molecule, others begin testing chemically similar molecules, hoping to "get in" on the category (e.g. statins). This is because there's a higher rate of success in developing a profitable brand in an established category where one successful molecule is already known. It's not necessarily a bad thing-- for example, it's quite good that Lexapro is available for those who might otherwise resort to the older and more side-effect-ridden Prozac-- but this leads to a proliferation of very similar molecules and devices, instead of research into entirely new approaches. In other words, the market ends up favoring optimization and refinement over innovation.
But what Graham means, is corporation in it's true sense of the word as a generic "body". The Catholic Church, Roman and Ottoman Empires, Hanseatic League, various hybrid religous orders such as the Teutonic Order and etc, can all be considered corporations. And in general, larger was better, with occasional shifts and retreats.
I think car manufacturing can be done by much smaller organizations. I suspect that pharmaceutical companies will have to change a lot; for all they spend on research, they simply don't prolong human life enough to justify being 14% of the economy.