Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public corporations have historically been multi-cellular biological organisms made up of individual cells working toward the collective goal of continuing the organism's existence. They're probably most analogous to bee hives. Each cell receives nourishment from the corporation in the form of monetary compensation (and other benefits). Some cells have a more direct role in the "reasoning" process of the organism tha…
> made up of individual cells I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws. > If the owners stop receiving value the organism becomes unable to nourish its cells and it dies. Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment. There's plenty of failing businesses with thei…
> You're attempting to rationalize something in biological terms that's somewhat irrational in logical terms.
I'm mainly riffing for fun. I don't have any thesis, beyond just expressing a general unease for how much power corporations have to influence social discourse, laws, and public policy.
I'm using this as an excuse to play w/ the mental picture I've had for decades of corporations as Godzilla-like monsters roaming the social landscape predating, excreting, and generally smashing-up anything that displeases them while individual people look on in horror, mostly powerless.
Now that humans are bolting large computational models onto corporate governance and strategy we're entering an exciting new mecha-Godzilla realm where, likely, individual human accountability to corporate actions will be even less (though it's hard for me to believe that's possible).
re: rationality
Corporations are irrational because all the actors in the corporation, and those outside who are making the rules, are irrational.
Their irrationality, unpredictability, and adaptability to regulation, particularly when they're hulking daikaiju-like monstrosities shambling thru society wantonly smashing their tails into other institutions and social infrastructure (or mating with other entities to create super-monstrosities), is what's troubling to me.
> I think this analogy is flawed. Corporations cannot exist without laws pertaining to them. They're made up of _laws_. The individual components all have actions dictated to them by these laws.
The law is a component of the environment. The law binds the corporation together, but it also constrains and shapes how it can act. I don't see the human legal system, as it relates to corporations, a whole lot differently than the laws of physics controlling the chemistry that make biological cells work.
A big difference, though, is that corporations can allocate resources to get the law changed. They can alter their environment to suit their manifest desires. Many times they simply adapt to the law (changing business processes to achieve legal compliance). Sometimes they just act counter to the law, likely because some individual cells working in a reasoning capacity will have significant individual gain and very little individual risk (Dieselgate, or maybe the subprime crisis of 2008).
I'm particularly troubled by the Citizens United decision, in the US, because it gave corporations themselves the power of speech. I think they'd always been able to alter their environment through influencing their owners and constituent cells, but this ruling gave them very direct ability. To belabor the Godzilla analogy, we used to be able to call upon the government to battle these monsters when their destruction was too severe. Now the monsters have exciting mind-control powers that they can unleash upon the government (by way of spending on political issues).
> Owners are people. They're vulnerable to sentiment.
Some owners are people, and some of those people are vulnerable to sentiment. I don't put too much faith in individual owners to give much of a crap about what their pet corporations are doing (beyond returning value). A very small fraction of people are invested in individual corporations (and those who are invested individually in a significant manner are highly motivated to help their pet corporations adapt to or change the environment to maximize returns).
Individual people are participating in a different kind of inscrutable manifest organism (pension funds, ETFs, etc) and I don't think they think much about their ownership. Those people are, by and large, just looking at returns, if they're even doing that. I'd argue that kind of ownership by-proxy dilutes individual sentimentality to the point of making it very, very ineffectual.