The newest global superpower: Apple

Apple has about 60,000 full-time employees around the world. Apple is a $600 billion company and growing. Nigeria has a population of about 170 million and a GDP less than half Apple’s market capitalization. Such comparisons may seem facile, but they should be made over and over until the full weight sinks in. Apple is not just a cool computer/phone/tablet company. It is an ecosystem and a society with more influence and power than most nations.

Like hundreds of its multinational brethren, Apple also is able to cherry-pick its costs. It can’t control the price of raw materials, but those are only a small portion of its expense. It does, however, have huge latitude in managing its labor costs. The imbroglio over working conditions in Chinese factories that produce Apple products spoke to the larger issue that Apple is so vastly profitable in part because it makes ideas but it does not bear the cost of labor to actually assemble its products. It contracts with labor, which means that the costs of education, of retirement and of health care are borne by someone else, often by governments, sometimes by individual workers not fortunate enough to work for Apple directly…

Apple’s success is the most dramatic symbol of the power of Corporateland. It also highlights the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves. Our national dramas about “the economy” have no place today for Apple and its brethren. Clearly enough people have enough income to spend on these goods and services, and clearly many believe their lives are better for what Apple—or hundreds of other companies—has to offer.