Corporations
“There were theories when I was a child about class warfare and struggles by innocent individuals against powerful monster-corporations capable of swallowing the world. Anyone with intellectual hunger was fed these theories, which were inherited from the Marxist belief that the tools of exploitation were self-feeding, that the powerful would grow more and more powerful, […]
“There were theories when I was a child about class warfare and struggles by innocent individuals against powerful monster-corporations capable of swallowing the world. Anyone with intellectual hunger was fed these theories, which were inherited from the Marxist belief that the tools of exploitation were self-feeding, that the powerful would grow more and more powerful, furthering the unfairness of the system. But one had only to look around to see that these large corporate monsters dropped like flies. Take a cross section of dominant corporations at any particular time; many of them will be out of business a few decades later, while firms nobody ever heard of will have popped onto the scene from some garage in California or some college dorm.
Consider the following sobering statistic. Of the five hundred largest U.S. companies in 1957, only seventy-four were still part of that select group, the Standard and Poor’s 500, forty years later. Only a few had disappeared in mergers; the rest either shrank or went bust.”
Nicholas Nassim Taleb – The Black Swan p221.
