[lapcat]

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.

[CrazyStat]

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.

[lapcat]

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

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

[CrazyStat]

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.

[lapcat]

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.

[CrazyStat]

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

[lapcat]

You're one of them.