It occurred to me this morning as I was driving to work that, when considering late-stage Capatalist organizations as an ecosystem, that the typical hierarchy composed of managers that know little or nothing about how to do the things the business was actually founded to do could be considered a form of parasitism on the actual work force. By extension, senior management can be sen as a form of hyper-parasitism.To stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, perhaps the business cycle can be seen as an example of a normal population cycle, where the population of producers (workers) grows, prompting a corresponding population explosion of parasites and hyper-parasites (management (and investors?)) until the burden of parasites is too great for the producers to support, causing first a producer population crash and then a parasite population crash (recession).

doug-miller