Hive-minds and Kleptocrats -- Krugman

[Donnachaidh]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/hive-minds-and-kleptocrats/?src=twt&twt=NytimesKrugman


It’s not often that I get a chance to accuse Charlie Stross of being stuck in the past, so I should take it — especially because it’s a way to avoid (a) commenting more on the tax debacle and (b) finishing the redraft of the monetary policy chapter in Krugman/Wells 3rd edition (how the heck do we get quantitative easing in without totally muddying everything else?)

So: for those who don’t know, Stross is a spectacularly good contemporary science-fiction author, brimming with ideas, who also has a stimulating blog, where his latest entry asks why things are so messed up. His proposed answer is that we’ve been invaded by alien organisms — namely, corporations:

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

More at the link ---

[snagglepuss]

1. Bkmrkd to read later. Thanks for posting. nt