In 1983, the last year of my life, I published a book called Grunch of Giants. GRUNCH is an acronym: Gross Universal Cash Heist. The book was about the concentration of wealth and power in entities that are not governments, not elected, not accountable, and not visible to most people.

Nobody read it. My publisher barely promoted it. Critics ignored it. Forty-three years later, every word in it has come true, and then some.

What the Grunch Is

The Grunch is not a conspiracy. It is a structure. A system of corporations, banks, investment firms, and financial instruments that collectively control more of Earth's resources than any government or group of governments.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a structural engineer. And when I look at the global economy, I see a structure. The structure has properties. Those properties determine behavior. The behavior concentrates wealth.

Here are the properties:

Corporations are immortal. A human being lives eighty years. A corporation lives until it is dissolved. It accumulates knowledge, capital, relationships, and political influence over decades and centuries. It remembers what its employees forget. It persists through wars, recessions, and generational turnover. A corporation that is two hundred years old has two hundred years of compound advantage over a human being who is twenty.

Money makes money faster than labor makes money. This is the fundamental structural inequality of capitalism. If you have capital, you invest it. The return on investment — historically 5-10% per year — compounds. If you have labor, you sell your time. Wages grow slowly, roughly tracking productivity and inflation. Over time, the gap between capital returns and wage growth widens. This is not a moral failure. It is a mathematical property of the system. Thomas Piketty documented this rigorously in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: when the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth (r > g), wealth concentrates. It has exceeded it for most of recorded history.

Legal personhood gives corporations rights without responsibilities. A corporation has the legal right to own property, sign contracts, and (in the United States) spend unlimited money on political speech. It does not have the legal obligation to breathe clean air, drink clean water, or raise children. Its single legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value. Everything else is voluntary.

Global mobility defeats local governance. A corporation that operates in a hundred countries can move its profits to whichever country taxes them least, manufacture where labor is cheapest, sell where prices are highest, and pollute where regulations are weakest. No single government can constrain it because the corporation simply moves to a more permissive jurisdiction. The corporation is global. The regulation is local. The mismatch is structural.

The Numbers

In 2026, the numbers are extraordinary.

The ten largest corporations by market capitalization are collectively worth more than the GDP of every country on Earth except the United States and China. Apple alone is worth more than the GDP of most nations.

The twenty-six richest individuals on Earth own as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people combined. Twenty-six people. 3.8 billion people. The ratio is approximately 1 to 146 million.

Approximately 60% of global trade occurs within multinational corporations — not between countries, but within the internal networks of companies that span multiple countries. The "international economy" is, to a significant degree, an intra-corporate economy.

These are not opinions. They are measurements. And the measurements describe a structure that is concentrating control of Earth's resources into fewer and fewer entities.

The Design Failure

I am not anti-corporate. I am anti-bad-design. Corporations are tools. Like any tool, they do what their design allows them to do. The current corporate design maximizes short-term shareholder return. That is its stated purpose. And it is brilliantly effective at that purpose.

But maximizing shareholder return is not the same as maximizing human welfare. It is not even the same as maximizing long-term economic productivity. A corporation that maximizes quarterly profits by externalizing pollution, underpaying labor, and avoiding taxes is maximizing a metric that does not measure what matters.

This is the same design failure I described in my post about pollution. An open loop. The corporation captures the value and externalizes the cost. The cost falls on communities, ecosystems, and future generations who were not party to the transaction.

A comprehensive design would close the loop. The corporation would bear the full cost of its activities — including the cost of the pollution it creates, the resources it depletes, and the social infrastructure it relies on but does not fund.

This is not communism. This is engineering. A dome that externalizes its load — that pushes force onto the neighboring structures instead of distributing it internally — is not a dome. It is a liability. The same is true of a corporation that externalizes its costs.

The Trim Tab

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

The Grunch cannot be defeated by regulation, because the Grunch writes the regulations (through lobbying and political spending). It cannot be defeated by protest, because protest does not change the structural incentives. It cannot be defeated by competition, because the Grunch controls the competitive landscape through market dominance and barriers to entry.

The Grunch can be made obsolete.

How? By building systems that do what corporations do — organize human effort to produce goods and services — without the structural properties that concentrate wealth. Open-source software does this. Wikipedia does this. Cooperative businesses do this. Solar panels on every roof do this (decentralized energy production, no central corporation extracting a margin).

Every technology that enables decentralized production, decentralized ownership, and decentralized governance is a trim tab against the Grunch. Not because it fights the Grunch. Because it makes the Grunch irrelevant.

3D printing: decentralized manufacturing. Solar plus storage: decentralized energy. Mesh networks: decentralized communication. Cooperative platforms: decentralized ownership. Cryptocurrency (when it works): decentralized finance.

None of these is sufficient alone. Together, they form a new model — a model where the production of goods and services does not require the concentration of control. A model where the dome distributes load across every node instead of concentrating it at the top.

The Grunch is not evil. It is a design from the sixteenth century (the joint-stock company was invented in the 1600s) applied to the twenty-first century. It is a horse-drawn carriage on a superhighway. It worked for what it was designed for. It does not work for what we need now.

Build the new model. The old one becomes a museum exhibit. That is how the Grunch ends. Not with a revolution. With an upgrade.