User:Dhanyavaada/James Glattfelder

James B. Glattfelder (* 1972) is a Swiss physicist and philosopher, who as an author deals with the history of science, the emergence of self-organization, and the defects of the global financial system.

Dissertation
Glattfelder obtained his doctorate in 2010 from the Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich with the thesis Ownership Networks and Corporate Control: Mapping Economic Power in a Globalised World.

The questions asked - and answered - in this work are those posed by Glattfelder in the Abstract:


 * "Who holds the most control in our globalized world?"
 * "How is economic control distributed globally?"
 * "To what degree are the top economic actors interconnected with each other?“

The main instrument for analysing these questions is the "corporate ownership network", which maps the ownership relationships between companies.

The work presented in this thesis is an empirical analysis of the global network of economic control.

"The results indicate that economic control is: (i) highly concentrated in the hands of few actors and much more concentrated than what was usually hypothesized by scholars and held in the public opinion; (ii) these powerful actors are not operating in isolation but are instead all interconnected in a tightly-knit group."

The work
The work The Network of Global Corporate Control, co-authored with Stefania Vitali and Stefano Battiston, which deals with the financial power of international players, triggered a number of articles in the press, including in the Tages-Anzeiger, in ZEIT, in Welt, in Forbes, Frankfurter Rundschau, Wired and Washington Post. The New York Times's Economics Blog reviewed the work favourably.

In early 2019, a follow-up study was published describing the evolution of the global shareholder network and the rise of BlackRock to become the most powerful owner after the global financial crisis.

In 2019, Glattfelder's book Information - consciousness - reality: how a new understanding of the universe can help answer age-old questions of existence was published. In this book, Glattfelder describes the rise of a new scientific paradigm based on the concept of information.