Hacker News Reader

Comment by CrazyStat | Hacker News Reader

> Today, the world’s biggest companies not only wield monopolistic power and exert considerable political influence, but in many cases have market capitalizations exceeding the GDPs of entire countries.

Comparing market capitalization to GDP makes no sense. Comparing revenue to GDP would be more appropriate.

View on HN

It's just an analogy, to show the vast scale of modern multi-national corporations. It's like when they say "If you lined up all of [X] in a row, it would encircle the Earth [N] times." Nothing more than an analogy. [X] never actually encircles the Earth. Some people are taking this analogy a bit too seriously.

The point is that these corporations have an unprecedented amount of market power, and as a result, political power too. Which makes it even more problematic that corporations are inherently non-democratic and don't answer to anything except profit: "By design, the corporation is not a democratic enterprise. Its management is hierarchical..."

Corporations are not exactly like authoritarian countries. Nobody is dumb enough to think that. It's just that there are some troubling similarities.

It's a bad and misleading analogy, because most readers will understand it as "companies are richer than countries"--which is probably exactly the feeling that Jacobin wants to evoke. I wouldn't accept such an analogy from a right wing news source (Fox News, say), and I won't accept it from a left wing news source.

To build on your analogy, it's like saying "if you laid all the people in the world in a line it would circle the globe N times" but not mentioning the fact that you're lining them up belly to back instead of head to toe.

We should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

> most readers will understand it as "companies are richer than countries"

Says who? You're not giving readers much credit.

No, I'm not. Most people don't understand the details of either corporate or national accounting, and the very important difference between an annual production measure like GDP vs a total market value measure like market cap will be lost on them, especially in passing.

Again you're speaking for "Most people" with no empirical evidence or polling.

Let me take a turn though: "Most people" aren't reading a Jacobin article at all. The only relevant audience is the readers of this article.

Unfortunately readers of Jacobin are perhaps particularly unlikely to understand the details of corporate and national accounting.

You're one of them.

Only in passing.

Thereby admitting that you actually know nothing about readers of Jacobin, and your slur was completely unjustified.

Bad reasoning. I bet you don't watch Newsmax, but you probably know some things about people who watch Newsmax.

I wanted to make a joke about it being exactly the kind of reasoning a Jacobin reader would use, but I'm refraining.

> I bet you don't watch Newsmax, but you probably know some things about people who watch Newsmax.

I don't, and I don't.

> I wanted to make a joke about it being exactly the kind of reasoning a Jacobin reader would use, but I'm refraining.

I'm not a regular Jacobin reader, "only in passing" as you say.

In any case, you're just spouting stereotypes invented in your own mind.

No, I've had enough Jacobin readers misinterpret Adam Smith to me to form an informed opinion.

Have you? How many, exactly?

In any case, it's not clear why interpreting Adam Smith (1723-1790) is an appropriate criterion here. Of course, I don't grant without evidence that you possess a correction interpretation of Adam Smith. FWIW (not much) I read The Wealth of Nations many years ago, though I don't claim to be a Smith scholar, and I have no wish to debate the matter with you. I just find it strange that you feel the need to drag him into this discussion.

> Have you?

Yes.

> In any case, it's not clear why interpreting Adam Smith (1723-1790) is an appropriate criterion here.

Because it speaks to both their reading comprehension and grasp of economics.

>> Have you?

> Yes.

You didn't answer my crucial follow-up question: "How many, exactly?"

> Because it speaks to both their reading comprehension and grasp of economics.

Not really. There's actually been quite a bit of work on that subject since the 18th century, if you hadn't heard.

What makes that follow-up question crucial?

The claim was "I've had enough Jacobin readers misinterpret Adam Smith to me to form an informed opinion." So the question is, how many do you believe is enough to justify the claim that your opinion is informed? Otherwise it would appear to be an unjustified overgeneralization based on extremely limited anecdotes.

"The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month." https://jacobin.com/about

I would guess that the number you've had Adam Smith specific conversations with is one, possibly even zero, but unlikely more than two. After all, since you're an "Only in passing" reader, it's unclear how you would get into large numbers of conversations of any kind with large numbers of Jacobin readers, much less specific conversations about Adam Smith interpretation.

Your guess would be incorrect. One doesn't need to be a Jacobin reader to meet Jacobin readers.

Also you didn't explain why this question is crucial.

Obviously it's crucial, because keep avoiding it, refusing to answer, while defensively asking why it's crucial instead of simply answering. It's not like I'm asking for your social security number here.

I did actually explain why, though: "Otherwise it would appear to be an unjustified overgeneralization based on extremely limited anecdotes."

It's crucial because obviously it's crucial!

I read it as saying, “there are state economies that, even surrendering all of the goods and services they’ve created and provided in a year, cannot exchange them for the full market value of some companies.”

Hasn't that been the case for at least a hundred years? I'm no economy historian, but I'd expect e.g. Liechtenstein's or San Marino's economy to be smaller than some company's market value since essentially their independence.

All that comparison really does is acknowledge that there are countries of vastly different size and wealth. Large companies from a giant nation will be much larger than a tiny country.

The size of some companies can be taken for granted. Living in a western industrialized country with many large companies, it’s easy to lose a sense of scale. The comparison widens the lens and grounds business organizations within the context of other human organizations e.g. the state. The comparison is also a setup for the next paragraph:

> One reason that’s significant: if many multinational companies actually were countries, they would be authoritarian dictatorships more ruthlessly efficient than any in existence. At many such companies, managers wield virtually unchecked power over subordinates and, thanks to modern technology, increasingly practice advanced techniques of monitoring and surveillance as well.

The missed distinction, of course, being that companies like Amazon don't send workers to penal colonies for forced labor, don't built walls to prevent them from leaving, and don't kill dissenters.

So not much like an authoritarian dictatorship at all.

Using those three characteristics as necessary conditions for authoritarian dictatorship excludes many actual historical authoritarian dictatorships as well.

Of course, in the context of layoffs, Amazon does effectively deport workers who are on employment-tied visas. In a sense, Amazon is sentencing them to "transportation if you can't find a job in a bad job market."

Yeah, but it compares companies from a state/economic zone of 300m or 450m people to a state of 4m people.

Sure, yeah, but that's like comparing a city of a 1million to one of 10k inhabitants and pointing at the much larger usage of construction material in absolute terms. Technically correct but ultimately useless.

If there's a company in the US that has a larger market cap than the US, that would make it more interesting. But even Apple is barely a tenth of it, and that's comparing the expected total future wealth of Apple to a year's worth of output of the US.

I'm not sure what comparing a year's amount of oranges to all future apples really tells us.

It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).

Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.

I was just reading something on Medium about this wrt Apple

That may be an accurate way to read it, but I’d bet that people just casually reading through it will breeze past that comparison and take away “these companies are bigger than most countries”.

Which, of course, is a comparison that Jacobin is more than happy to let slide. Jacobin’s own description of itself is “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.”

Maybe, but I’m cautious about assuming my own superiority, i.e. that my lonely cohort and I are the only ones able to read and infer the proper meaning from writing, and that others are too easily misguided.

It seems this is how they are generally compared by economists? Revenue vs GDP doesn't really tell a good story. Wal-mart does not wield remotely the same influence as Apple, but have like 5x their revenue.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-tech-giants-worth-compa...

The author of that piece is not an economist, he's a journalist with an undergrad business degree focused on real estate.

Influence is difficult to quantify, but Walmart certainly wields a lot of it. Just ask any of their suppliers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com