Talk-Polywell.org

just a very few corporations through direct and indirect ownership (via stocks, bonds, etc.) exert tremendous influence over the actions of those corporations, which in turn exert a huge impact on the rest of us.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-pow ... world.html

How many of those are public companies?
How many have significant various government ownership or investment?
Does the Orbis database provide enough reliable data to have been the sole information provider for the study?
Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

Well, I am not sure what would be good about it. Uniting all that wealth in so few companies does not really add to the stability of the system and what should be smaller events can have catastrophic outcome, as we all could see pretty well lately.

indirect ownership

That is a very misleading construct I think. It smacks of Kevin Baconism.

Doesn't surprise me; corporatism has been gaining steam for a while now. All part of the marxist Globalization goal.

What you meant to say is 147 people control 40% of the world's wealth. Each of those companies is led by one person.

Scupperer wrote:Doesn't surprise me; corporatism has been gaining steam for a while now. All part of the marxist Globalization goal.

yes, and Bush is behind the WTC attacks. And men never landed on the moon.

I read today that 400 families receive 50% of US income per year, the top 1% of wage earners control 70%.

I tried to care about this, but it was pretty hard considering they're owned by billions of shareholders.

This isn't very coherent:

In this analysis the focus was on corporations that have ownership in their own assets as well as those of other institutions and who exert influence via ownership in second, third, fourth, etc. tier entities that hold influence over others in the web, as they call it;

By this standard I could personally claim to "control" about 40% of the U.S. economy. Bow before my index funds!

Skipjack wrote:

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

Well, I am not sure what would be good about it. Uniting all that wealth in so few companies does not really add to the stability of the system and what should be smaller events can have catastrophic outcome, as we all could see pretty well lately.

Well because of the dynamics of wealth, it's going to follow a "Pareto distribution" no matter what. The only question is what the parameter on the Pareto distribution is (it's a power-law so it's a scale-invariant single-paramenter distribution function) and what the impications of that are. Greater wealth disparity = a larger value, more equality = a smaller value.

Socially speaking a higher parameter value means less upward mobility. Dynamically speaking it means, as skipjack said, that it's proportially less stable. The size and frequency of catastropic events increases with the parameter. Perhaps most notable is that the kullback-lieblier divergence from maximal information flow increases with the parameter. Meaning a country with a high economic disparity is going to be that much less responsive and that much more "divorced from reality". One could argue that this would negatively impact its growth rate.

All these things seem to suggest that a lower parameter is ideal. But intuitively one would think there comes a point where lower is worse; that the "optimal" value for the parameter is > 0. After all, with no economic disparity there's no economic incentive, either.

Unfortunately I haven't seen much literature on the subject. Overall I haven't been all that impressed with the current state of mathematical economics. It has yet to incorporate - nonetheless build upon - many of these more modern paradigms.

Did anyone read the first paragraph at the Link? It does NOT say that 147 companies control 40% of the world's wealth--so this thread is misnamed.

What it says is that 147 companies "control nearly 40% of the monetary value of transnational companies." So first of all, we're NOT talking about the world's wealth--much of it is tied up in socialist governments like Venezuela, Russia and all the old OPEC countries, that don't appear on the list of 43,60 Trans National Companies (TNC's). Remember, Exxon/Mobile is still the world largest company, though momentarily bumped from that spot by Apple a few weeks ago; and it is much smaller than most of the oil producing entities found around the world.

This report is a bunch of useless hype, that draws irrelevant distinctions in order to misdirect people's attention and help form a reason to hate corporations. This is indeed socialist rhetoric.

Yes and as soon as we get more socialism, the bottom 1% and the top 5% will all be equally poor, dressed in burlap, just as it has been anywhere before in history.

Socialism is that horrible experiment in human suffering on who's alter so many lives have been sacrificed.

Thou shall not covet.

WillKell wrote:Yes and as soon as we get more socialism, the bottom 1% and the top 5% will all be equally poor, dressed in burlap, just as it has been anywhere before in history.

Socialism is that horrible experiment in human suffering on who's alter so many lives have been sacrificed.

Thou shall not covet.

I remember something about not living in excess....goes both ways.

Shouldn't this topic being in General and not News?

Shouldn't this topic being in General and not News?

Yupp, see it that way as well.