Printed: 2012-02-10

Instititute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

IEET Link: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/2469

The Power Pyramid

Mike Treder

Responsible Nanotechnology

http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2008/05/the-power-pyramid.html

June 01, 2008

How much power do we truly have in making our ideas matter? My estimate that only about one in a million among us—about six thousand people in the whole world—has enough power to effect change on a global basis.

Last September, I drew up a diagram (below) to illustrate the power disparity, as I saw it, and showed the graphic to several colleagues for their reaction. Almost everyone accepted the basic proposal.

In his recently published book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, David Rothkopf writes about the world's power elite who "ride on Gulfstreams, set the global agenda, and manage the credit crunch in their spare time," and who "have more in common with each other than their countrymen."

A long article by Rothkopf in the April 14, 2008, issue of Newsweek summarizes his arguments and describes how he defines this 'superclass':

So how does one become a member? As ever, being rich certainly helps. Many superclass members are wealthy, wealthier in relative terms than any elite ever has been. The top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet. But wealth is only part of the equation. Power is the other currency of any true elite, and if we want to understand the superclass, we need to look at those who have influence that crosses borders—one of the factors that differentiates them from most of the elites of history, whose influence was predominantly national or even more local in nature.

One can debate who is in and who is out endlessly. . . This is a very fluid ranking. But for the purposes of trying to understand the nature of today's topmost global elite, working with the above criteria, I have ended up with a core group of somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 people—meaning that each one is "one in a million."

Well, imagine my surprise when I read that. Originally I'd pulled the numbers out of my hat (or anywhere else you'd prefer to name) as little more than an educated guess. But it looks like my intuition was correct, or at least that someone else with access to much more information came to the same basic conclusion.

Again, from the Newsweek article:

Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Wall Street's Blackstone Group, says, "The world is pretty small. In almost every one of the areas in which I am dealing or in which we at Blackstone are looking at deals, you find it is just 20, 30 or 50 people worldwide who drive the industry or the sector." Numbers tell the same tale. If you take just the people who serve in top management positions or on the boards of the five biggest companies in the world, you'll find they also serve on the boards of an additional 140 other major companies and 22 universities. To Schwarzman, being a member of the superclass means being able to "get to anybody in the world with one phone call."

So, what does this mean? How can those of us in the small green segment of the global pyramid above make an impact on the much tinier red segment at the top? Is there any real hope for that? Or are we just spitting into the wind as we hold forth with our opinions?

Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.