Interesting read. What I don't get is that they compare Moloch (total competition) to Nature.
> (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc.
Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.
The human body (and most systems like it) essentially have lots and lots of systems whose essential purpose is to prevent the cells in our body from competing with each other, and when these systems break and allow our cells to compete freely with each other it leads to cancer.
Organizations into cells, organs, systems, is basically describing mergers and acquisitions, and also that companies have different roles inside them, each doing various tasks: marketing, sales, engineering, management, etc.
I'm still processing the article in my head, but as I understood it: it's important that all cells in your body share the same genome. For some reason, evolution in multicellular organisms can be seen as two-tier - competition between the cells, and competition between collections of cells (organism). The higher-level competition forces the individual cells to behave in fully-cooperative way; those organisms that can't enforce order within get cancer and die prematurely.
The mechanics of it seem sound, and it's a nice model for a lot of things, natural and otherwise, but I'm still confused about how such two-tiered evolution could've arisen in nature wrt. multi-cellular structures.
> (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc.
Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.