| It's possible to estimate this using public, easily Googlable data: http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=a7jenngfc4um7_ Total U.S. GDP is about $15T. Of that, $8T is compensation of employees, so roughly half accrues to wage-earners (this ranges from the janitor to the CEO, but is probably exhibits a bit less inequality than returns to capital. $5.6T is gross operating surplus: this is profit that accrues to incorporated businesses. GDP is defined as wages + profits + gross mixed income (effectively profits accruing to unincorporated businesses; things like sole proprietors and landlords) + taxes - subsidies. Subsidies is negligible (about $60B) and taxes are about $1T, so that leaves about $500B as GMI (this seems pretty low to me, but I guess most business owners choose to incorporate these days). Now the question is how much of the $5.6T in profits accrues to publicly traded vs. privately traded companies. This isn't broken out by the government stats, but you can estimate it from financial data. The total market cap of the S&P 500 is about $18.5T: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500 The P/E of the S&P 500 is about 18.68: http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-peyield.html Market cap divided by P/E gives earnings, by definition, so the total profit accrued by publicly-traded companies is roughly $1T. Similar math done on the Wilshire 5000 index gave the same result. So as a very rough ballpark estimate, the total value-add by privately-traded companies is roughly 5x that of publicly-traded companies. It would likely be hard to find similar figures for 150 years ago, both because you can't just Google up 150-year-old data, and because 150 years ago the NYSE operated out of coffeehouses and the ticker symbol hadn't yet been invented. |