There were theories when I was a child about class warfare and struggles by innocent individuals against powerful monster-corporations capable of swallowing the world.  Anyone with intellectual hunger was fed these theories, which were inherited from the Marxist belief that the tools of exploitation were self-feeding, that the powerful would grow more and more powerful, furthering the unfairness of the system.  But one only had to look around to see that these large corporate monsters dropped like flies.  Take a cross section of the dominant corporations of any given time; many of them will be out of business a few decades later, while firms nobody ever heard of will have popped onto the scene from some garage in California or from some college dorm.

Consider the following sobering statistic.  Of the five hundred larges US companies in 1957, only seventy-four were still part of that select group, the Standard & Poor's 500, forty years later.  Only a few had disappeared in mergers; the rest either shrank or went bust.