The Too Big to Fail Whale

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2 pointsmarojejian3 comments

A conceptual problem with this analogy is that when a corporate whale dies in a community the people that live their wouldn't be represented by other separate organisms - they would be the cells of the whale and cells of other whales.

This article is just much like the theory of social darwinism, in that it willfully twists valid scientific knowledge to push a social agenda that has little in common with the analogy. "We need more [vulture capitalists], not less" my foot.

I may be wrong, but I can guarantee I'm not willfully twisting anything! Like any analogy it works differently depending on how you interpret it.

As I see it, people don't 'live' within the corporation they work for, therefore they are not like the cells. They are better understood as the energy that made the whale tick. 'Decomposers' are helping those resources become re-deployed somewhere else.

In the economic end of the analogy, they're not dying, they're getting jobs in another company that is growing, not dead. Just because a company fails, it does not follow that net jobs in the economy need to.

This was my disappointment with the auto and banking industry bail-outs in the US. We spent a lot of money and effort that just kept the status quo.

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