Oct
29
Submitted by Jeffrey on Wed, 2008-10-29 09:15
I subscribe to the netcast (iTunes link) of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar, provided by Stanford University.
One lecture was slightly off-topic and very interesting about how power is concentrated in this world. Granted, this is one man's observation, but it seems accurate enough. The discrepancy of power is large enough to be rather obvious, even it his numbers are off a little.
David Rothkopf claims that 6,000 people control the world through a network of financial control, direct power and influence, heredity, reputation and even luck. 6,000 seems rather large too, when you consider how they are related and networked among themselves. The structure-within-the-structure suggests even fewer people wield the vast majority of the power.
David doesn't see this as a bad thing. It does lend stability to the world, usually. This lecture was interesting enough to motivate me to checkout two of his books from the library:
- Superclass (which is an expansion of this lecture)
- Running the World (a related work about our own nation's power structures)
I'll review those books more thoroughly when I finish them. This lecture is a good synopsis of his points. So far, I agree with him about 30% of the time.
He doesn't see the same risks that I do in world-wide powers of government. We completely disagree on the proper role of government and its proper structures. I believe that government is irrevocably an individual responsibility and as such, any separation or consolidation of governance must remain close to the people. The further government gets from the control of individual people, the less effective it gets. It becomes tyrannical, oppressive, and even destructive.
David makes a point that national governments are powerless to bring real order to our new world-wide economy and relationships. He claims that we need a central, world-wide government (greater than the UN) to bring peace, order and stability to the entire world. His books actually provide some evidence to the contrary, but he doesn't see it.
