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Some projections into the future of the world economy depict an increasing rate of economic concentration, inviting serious thoughts as to its ability to provide for human welfare and to maintain a reasonable degree of diversity and pluralism in the world social system. Howard Perlmutter (1969, 1968) advances what he calls the "300-Hypothesis," a prediction that the global system of the future will be dominated by 300 or so giant enterprises. Economist Stephen Hymer (1970) propounds the same hypothesis and argues that present trends could produce a regime of 300 or 400 multinational corporations controlling 60 to 70% of the world industrial output. And Richard Barber's (1970) recent discussion of concentration in the American economy contends that "the entire industrialized world will soon be characterized by as high a degree of concentration as now prevails in the United States." By 1980, concludes Barber (1970: 264), "three hundred corporations will control 75 percent of the world's manufacturing assets."'