Snip!t from collection of Alan Dix

<div id="attachment_2595" class="wp-caption alignright" style="width: 370px;"><img class="size-full wp-image-2595 " title="corporatepowermap" src="http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bruceupbin/files/2011/10/corporatepowermap.jpg" alt="" height="359" width="360"><p class="wp-caption-text">Visualizing the "super entity." Courtesy: New Scientist</p></div> <p>Three systems theorists at the <span class="zem_slink">Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich</span> have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf">They built a model of who owns what</a> and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.</p> <p>They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all. The top 20 are at the bottom of the post. This is, say the paper&#x2019;s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.</p>