Too Few Company’s Rule The World

There’s a lot of talk these days about the “one percent problem.” What it usually relates to is random anger at a few hundred billionaires who own two-thirds of the world’s wealth. That I’ll leave for another day. Today I want to talk about a much bigger one percent problem which is going largely unnoticed. The fact that a handful of companies rule the world!

A few hundred years ago an Italian economist by the name of Pareto came up with the 80/20 rule and for much of the 20th Century, that rule was used by managers and leaders to run their businesses. The rule simply states that 80% of the wealth or the profits, or production come from 20% of the people. The idea, of course, is that you focus your efforts, your time, your money on that 20% while largely ignoring the unproductive 80%.

The rule worked for just about everything for hundreds of years. The problem is that over the last few decades and especially since the advent of the Internet the 80/20 rule no longer works. Without anybody seeming to notice, it became the 90/10 rule and then he 95/5 rule and now it’s more like 99/1 rule.

For example:

99% of all website traffic comes from one percent of companies like Google. I don’t know what percentage of the world’s online shopping traffic Amazon has but after this coronavirus scare it’s I bet it’s damn close to…