Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Now that's fucking interesting

Some crafty Swiss physicists have managed to measure just how accurate our paranoid conspiracy theories really are. It's a heavy duty paper, but the basic idea is that the local dispersion of control (how many different people own a stock) and the global concentration of control (what fraction of the stock market is controlled by what fraction of the populace) are independent variables. A couple of charts illustrate this admirably. This one shows the definition of the terms:


And the next one shows the punchline, namely where the US falls. Only Japan has a more globally concentrated ownership structure, a fact obscured by the local dispersion of American ownership.


You may now freak out with full empirical justification.

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