Changez’s boss, Jim, explains his role in terms that suture together evolution and economics to imply the inevitability of globalization. When Changez becomes deflated by local resistance to his attempts to cut the “fat” off an ailing New Jersey cable operator—a process that will result in outsourcing, consolidation, and “headcount reduction”—Jim consoles him with a personal history of neoliberal economic realities: “The economy is an animal.… It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That’s where I wanted to be. In finance. In the coordination business. And that’s where you are. You’re blood brought from some part of the body that the species doesn’t need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We came from places that were wasting away” (97, emphasis in original).

XREF: This biological-evolution metaphor for economics parallels other social Darwinist framings of globalization in migration and labor literature.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 450