The 147 companies that run everything. It's only 'natural'

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

For some reason, the scientists who have suddenly "discovered" that a relatively tiny group of corporations, funds and banks have amassed enourmous wealth and power, find a need to distinguish themselves from the Occupy Movement which has been saying the same thing for years.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs). -- New Scientist

But we're scientists, not ideologues, says one of the scientists.

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says another.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team that made the discovery.

Okay. So it's not a conspiracy and your discovery of the extreme concentration of wealth and power is complicated and transcends ideology. Agreed.

But neither a good nor bad thing?

It's the "natural" order of things?

Really?

Sounds ideological to me.

Fastest growing occupations in the U.S. require no degree

'Zip-code apartheid' 

 

Edward Luce, writing in the Financial Times, reports on the changing face of the U.S. labor market. With the virtual decimation of our manufacturing sector and the flight of capital to emerging markets in the developing countries, a growing share of whatever jobs our economy is still managing to create is in the least productive areas -- the types that neither computers nor China have yet found a way of eliminating. 

 Of the five occupations forecast by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be the fastest growing between now and 2018, none requires a degree. These are registered nurses, “home health aides”, customer service representatives, food preparation workers and “personal home care aides”.

 "The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class,” says Dan DiMicco, chief executive of Nucor, one of America’s two remaining big steel companies, whose company motto is “a nation that builds and makes things”.

What does all this have to do with schooling in the Ownership Society? If you look at schooling mainly in the light of the U.S. trying to maintain or regain its position atop the global economy, things look bleak. Luce writes that U.S. education and training budgets have gone in the wrong direction in the past few years. State schools and vocational community colleges derive much of their funding from local property taxes. That model brings two big disadvantages. First, it means community colleges are victims of “zip code apartheid” – the lower the property values in an area, the less money there is to train the workforce or educate the children.

“Every American is going to have to get used to the idea of a completely different work style,” says Mr Camden, whose company farms out hundreds of thousands of temporary workers around the world, from lawyers to office assistants. “What you learnt in college five years ago may already be obsolete.”

Actually, what I learned, what we all should be learning  -- how to think critically -- will never be obsolete.

Has America in 2011 become 200 AD Rome?

Dust-bowl refugees walk towards Los Angeles during the Great Depression. House prices have now fallen further than in the 1930s. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

British Guardian Economics Editor, Larry Elliott ponders whether America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead: military overstretch, a widening gulf between rich and poor, a hollowed-out economy, citizens using debt to live beyond their means, and once-effective policies no longer working. -- "Decline and fall of the American empire"