Figure 8

Allotaxonometric comparison of publicly traded US companies in 2007 and 2018 by fourth quarter market capitalization. The rank-rank histogram is a hybrid of a vertical structure we see for relatively stable systems (Fig. 1B), and a ‘vee’ of disjoint systems (Fig. 1D). The disjoint feature results from sharp transitions as companies fail, merge with or are acquired by others, or go public or return to private, but also from missing or erroneous data. Berkshire Hathaway’s market cap, for example, was misrecorded as a thousand fold drop. We include the incorrect rankings for Berkshire Hathaway and DowDuPont Inc to help show how an allotaxonometric analysis can sharply reveal dataset problems. The corrected allotaxonograph follows in Fig. 9. See Sect. 3.6 for discussion, and Sect. 5.1 for dataset details