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Comment by golly_ned | Hacker News Reader

> Merely eliminating [homework[ for a few weeks resulted in two trillion dollar companies. Imagine what the US GDP would be if reading period at Harvard were twice as long.

This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.

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Also, just logically considering hundreds of thousands of students have been part of Harvard reading periods over the years, and there are two unicorn events where reading period may have played some small part in the formation of a trillion dollar company, I'd imagine that if the reading period at Harvard were twice as long the US GDP would likely be approximately exactly the same as it is now.

Yeah but they'd have twice as many parties at Harvard in that time, and what if that means there are twice as many chances for a Business student at frat party to hook up with the daughter of a billionaire and then rope his technically competent friend into working on this "crazy idea" he had high off his ass? I say, why do we even need classes at Harvard, we just need a lot of frat guys and slutty daughters of billionaires and they can just hire people from MIT to work under them. The system works.

Large companies provide people with jobs and fund many suppliers with their transactions/operations. Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.

It can be viewed that way or it can be viewed that large companies have destroyed smaller companies by utilising slave labour and grey area practices to get the market share and then they are the only employers left for many.

What do small companies do?

Rhetorical question.

> Walmart and Amazon are the two biggest employers in the US.

One of the two biggest employers in the US is one who treats their employees so poorly that they have to pee in bottles and continue working after a colleague has died and been left on the floor? If that’s the kind of jobs large companies “provide”, it’s not worth it. We’d much better off with several small companies that give people the flexibility to escape draconian working conditions.

https://nypost.com/2026/04/15/business/amazon-warehouse-empl...

https://futurism.com/future-society/amazon-accused-hiding-de...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/05/24/de...

And both of them rely on government welfare to keep their employees from starving so that they can pass more wealth on to shareholders. A study earlier this year (below) estimated that more than a million Walmart and Amazon employees nationwide depend on Medicaid.

https://www.ips-dc.org/report-americas-20-largest-low-wage-e...

> This idea that "very large company" -> "productive economy" needs to die.

I am economically naive, but I also have never understood this argument. I asked a Spanish friend what Spain needed, he said “more big companies”. Is it because a big company provides you something closer to a monopoly, and can do so internationally?

Not that your Spanish friend's opinion on what Spain needs is enough to exemplify what Spaniards (or Europeans) as a whole want and think.

it's a crude approximation to economies of scale. However, big doesn't always mean economies of scale because efficiency tends to drop when growing big, unless the head works hard to ensure it isnt bloating. Unfortunately, sometimes these managers (i.e., non-founding managers) rather have a bigger fiefdom rather than a better/more efficient company.

could you explain your perspective more?

i see it as: large companies are proof that much trade and consumption has occurred.

They are proof monopoly power was captured.

And practically, they are not good for democracy or even economy as such.

Large companies are more like proof that much concentration of wealth and power has occurred.

in the examples i can think of, this happens mostly because the company provides a product or service that is valuable to many, and shares the surplus with consumers. i am thinking about companies like microsoft, apple, netflix, google, stripe, walmart, costco, albertson's, starbucks, sysco.

what are the companies you are thinking about?

Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Standard Oil, Railways of old…

Big companies like apple or meta screw their home countries (and most other countries, apart from tax havens) dramatically. Basically no taxes paid which is core to how state and everything is financed, have often enough power and huge egos to start meddling with running the state itself. They are utterly selfish entities run by highly functioning sociopaths with no concern about long term wellbeing of population. I could go on and on like this. Yes, some do give nice salaries but apart from faangs in SV its not the rule.

Bunch of smaller companies would have to form some sort of long term cartel and sync those egos to achieve anything close to one major company.

Last thing this world needs is another fuckup trillionaire with massive childhood/mental issues and ego bigger than Everest who thinks he knows where humanity should go (to serve their wishes and needs). Or just milk mankind of anything good remaining like zuckenberg is doing.

I don't need to name further, we can all imagine our own elons on that place

i'm sorry you're feeling upset about this.

Why large company vs lots of money changing hand in the sector over lots of companies?

this is also good! we can have both.

Can we? Large companies with big profits are usually evidence of regulatory capture.

I see it as 'Large companies are proof that concentration of wealth and capital is occurring, and that unless something structural changes, it will continue to occur.'

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