Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot. How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Furthermore, you are implying that all that people do has to be done with the societal value in mind. What about the value for individuals? Look at yourself for example. Do you do everything you do for the societal value or to pursue your own separate interests?

Those $10M companies don't do research because they are research. The founders have an idea, they try it out, if it works they get acquired by a big company that doesn't do nearly as much of its own research as it used to because this is easier. Sometimes the big companies deliberately let groups of employees leave to try something, with IP and funding and legal indemnification, then buy them back if it works. So plenty of research actually occurs, and it's the big companies that don't need to be part of funding it.

Sure, but if these big companies with lots of money to spend did not exist, there would be no one to buy the smaller ones.

Would that be so bad? If the small companies funded by other means (let's call that "venture capital") could grow into medium-sized fish themselves instead of being gobbled up by the big fish, that might actually be a healthier ecosystem.

Companies benefit from protections given to them by society. E.g. limited liability, copyright, patents and lots of others. So I think it's prudent to ask ourselves as a society from time to time if these privileges are still useful or maybe should be modified or revoked.

I agree that for a lot of research you need to be of a certain size but I don't think you need to be a multi-hundred-billion dollar company. Apple was pretty innovative in the 2000s when they were much smaller. From casual observation it looks to me that they are doing less innovation now than they did back then.

Well, you don't think the society benefits from the companies? Where else would you get all the stuff we use for everything? Where do you get the factories? Where do you get the machines? Where do you get the software?

If you don't think companies bring societal value, ask yourself what the alternatives are. There were a bunch of attempts in the 20th century, however it never ended good for the population.

Society overall gets varying amounts of utility from companies. Mostly they exist to help their owners harness the wealth creating power of workers. By some methods of accounting, many of them are a drain on society; they centralize wealth and create much bigger external costs (resource depletion, pollution) than they create value (engineered obsolescence, disposable crap, useless products & services or ones that serve artificially created demand)

Car dealers, patent trolls, for-profit health insurers, security-theatrics firms, content-distribution conglomerates (ISPs in the US) all are exploiting regulation or lack thereof to profit at societies expense. A lot of finance industry behavior is about unproductively extracting money from other participants. (for example 401k holders)

It's my opinion we should aggressively curb all counterproductive business models, but they tend to be good at protecting themselves. They either win over the masses through PR and deceit, or use more direct corruption of regulators.

I said "companies of a certain size". Don't make this into a socialism vs capitalism issue. Yes, companies benefit society. But I believe trillion dollar companies are a negative for society. They get way too powerful.

Only if they use their power to more bad things than good things.

Which they do all the time with no consequence.

By the same line of thinking dictatorships are also only bad if they use their power for more bad things than good things.

Yeah, so?

Same with governments and the attempts at state capitalism you're referring to. Everything always is good unless it's bad, the question is how easily can it be constrained when it goes bad (and monitored for the signs of it going bad).

> Big companies add huge value to all our wellbeing. 1000 companies with a revenue of ten million dollars can afford to spend little to nothing on research, while one company with a revenue of ten billion dollars can spend a lot.

There's a lot of space between companies with 10 million dollars in revenue and ones with 10-100 billion where lots of R&D can happen.

Smaller companies can be very good at new product development, and are probably better at supporting those products once they catch on and become established. The really far-out R&D is probably better handled by university research labs than by big-company monopolies and semi-monopolies, which then will spin off small product development companies.

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Seems like quite a lot, actually:

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180509/BLOGS11/180...

http://fortune.com/2016/05/13/big-pharma-biotech-startups/:

> A crucial part of the allure: Pint-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller ­outfits—64% of them last year, according to HBM Partners, a health care investing firm.

There is only one medicine in the past 100 years that cured a chronic illness besides penicillin and its derivatives. That medicine was developed by a small biotech company named Pharmasset and bought by Gilead.

So to answer your question, one might say that 100% of medicines that are not addictive pills to treat symptoms were developed by startups.

To be fair, a lot of the addictive pills to treat symptoms were also developed by startups.

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Lots, and lots try and fail (the ones that succeed, or even make it past the first few big hurdles, often get acquired by the big players, because buying work that's done is less risky than early research...)

> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?

Is that a serious question? The answer is plenty, you just don't hear about them because they're bought up once the FDA approves their medicine.

Would a bunch of small companies have invented the smartphone? I feel like you often need to have concentrations of a lot of capital at once for big things to happen.

A bunch of small companies invented the smartphone. Who do you think invented it?

Or just a couple of smart, dedicated people in a garage