Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by paulpauper 415 days ago
Agree

Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States: 99.9% of businesses are small, nearly half the private workforce is employed by small businesses, they generate over 43% of the country’s GDP

Hardly. Look at the concentration of the nasdaq 100--it's all huge companies. Same for the DJIA. Big companies play an increasingly important role.

3 comments

> Look at the concentration of the nasdaq 100--it's all huge companies. Same for the DJIA.

The nasdaq 100 is the largest companies that exist. That's why that index exists. Ditto for S&P-500.

The DJIA is also exclusively large capital businesses.

Pretty much any index out there is going to be primarily composed of the largest players in the market, that's just how these things work.

But relative to the other parts of the economy and GDP. In 1980s the biggest of companies were not so dominant relative to today.
I get that, but your statement was a little off to me. "Look at this index which tracks large companies, it's filled with large companies!" is effectively what you said.
Of course the nasdaq 100; the 100 largest (qualifying) companies on nasdaq is all huge companies. If there's hundreds of thousands of companies, and you pick 100 of the largest, they'll be huge. Very few small businesses will be listed on Nasdaq at all.

The stat says 43% of gdp is from small business and 50% of non-government workers, too. That means they're important. Of course, the large businesses are the other half of the economy with just 0.1% of the number of businesses.

I think the point is, if you ignore small or big business, you're ignoring half the economy.

> Big companies play an increasingly important role.

I’m sorry that line sticks out to me. Are you implying that big businesses already don’t dominate the economy?

I don't know how you arrive at that implication. The word dominant is pretty obvious what it means.