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.
> 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.
So not much like an authoritarian dictatorship at all.
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.
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.