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CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

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Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#91

These remarks about the salary of the last percentile of the population only serve to raise controversy. If you want to see how people's well-being has evolved, you have to make somewhat more intelligent comparisons: for example by looking at what people can afford today compared to 50 years ago, or through quality of life indexes. The only thing that has changed for the worse seems to me to be the cost of real estat…

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Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if we're talking about co-opting the anger around wealth inequality, that particular fight ended with Occupy Wall Street becoming Black Lives Matter.

I actually disagree somewhat. A great of MAGA rhetoric was/is about elites abusing their positions at the expense of regular folk. Trump was viewed as an insider telling people the truth about how the sausage gets made.

yeah, but MAGA is even more diffuse and ineffective as a movement than Occupy was

Occupy was seriously thinking about killing the rich, but MAGA just has some nebulous ideas that there are pedophile cannibals sneaking around and that social media and the news are heavily biased

Plus there's the fact that Occupy Wall Street was popular among pretty much everyone below a certain wealth level, but now everyone from that demographic is split up into smaller groups who hate each other: MAGA, Bernie Bros, "Hillary/Biden or You're A Nazi", etc

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#93
MOVIE PLOT: Refined hedge fund/blackmail ring whisks potential CEOs to private island, gets candidates all liquored-up, at which point children engage in 'activities' with them.

This is all recorded.

Later, CEOs invest large chunks of their salaries in the 'hedge fund'.

Evidence never quite leaks, as the 'hedge fund' has quite a few customers in various public offices.

Oh, never mind. Too far-fetched. Couldn't be happening. Right in front of everyone. Now.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#94
post #79

These remarks about the salary of the last percentile of the population only serve to raise controversy. If you want to see how people's well-being has evolved, you have to make somewhat more intelligent comparisons: for example by looking at what people can afford today compared to 50 years ago, or through quality of life indexes. The only thing that has changed for the worse seems to me to be the cost of real estat…

You seem to have missed that the thrust of the article could more be about overpaid CEO's than it is about underpaid workers.

How likely are the odds their proposed solutions will result in better pay for workers? Rather than just higher tax rates?

Only one mentions workers pay:

> setting corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation

Even that doesn't seem like a good incentive to pay workers more.

It's also not clear how the IRS is going to evaluate CEO pay -> yearly tax rate when this study uses 'realized gains' which often happen well after the fact, since CEOs are paid with stock/equity. The study mentions almost all of the growth has been via the % of stocks CEOs now get, not their actual salary.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#95
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point should someone's creation be confiscated and given to employees?

Gradually over the course of ~12-36 years, depending on the number of employees. If you started your business, say, Bamazon, 25 years ago or whatever, and its year 26, you're a trillion dollar corporation, etc, most of the new value add happening at Bamazon isn't down to the CEO's brilliance anymore, just because of the sheer scale of Bamazon. So by then most of that new value add should be going to the workers. Bezo…

This is nice in theory. What do you think happens in practice? People have two primary motivations for starting businesses. Money and independence. For the half that value independence, they will not hire people and all their businesses will remain lifestyle businesses.

I actually don't think it's nice in theory either btw. How does employee control benefit society at large? It only benefits employees. Employees will just pay themselves as much as they can for the least amount of work possible. It's the same reason price controls on housing are dumb. It just creates an entrenched class of individuals. If adding more employees to the business means the employee share of profit shrinks, they will just hire less.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#96

Because CEOs are 399x smarter and work 399x harder! Plus they take all the risk! /s

I feel it's not a stretch to say your average ceo has more than 399x impact however.

A 'simple decision' such as do I approve this product or not can make or break a company. The iPhone is a great example, it was far from considered a slam dunk money printer at the time. You can still find old articles from people wondering why you would want to browse the web on a phone.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#97
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't give a single fuck about the salary of the 0.0001% of the population that is billionaire CEO, that's not the problem. The problem is that basic necessities have been turned into a profit-printing machine and you pay 2K a month for a 500 square feet apartment in London. Interesting that you don’t see those things as part of the same problem but rather two separate unrelated issues.

How are they directly related? Is Bezos, Gates or Musk at fault for high UK house prices ? No, it's a failing of government policy. Straggling house building for decades, leads directly towards rampant land speculation. (70+% of a houses value is the land...)

Actually, at least in Helsinki part of the rising costs of housing in the centre has been attributed to so called vacation housing, where apartments have been bought by rich people from abroad or rural areas, yet occupied maybe a couple of days/weeks a year, or rented out as an airbnb flat. I'm not saying its a major factor, but still an indicator that theres more than enough money to spend for some people, for them to take out from the 'necessities' pool, just to achieve some form of luxury.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#98
post #69

Capital allocators are always paid top dollar. CEOs are only a small part of it. Wall street bankers are paid top dollar too? They find investment opportunities that can generate returns. Traders make a lot of money too. What value do they add to society? They help in the price discovery of assets. Are they paid fairly, who knows? From a job complexity standpoint, CEO jobs are more challenging than bankers since they…

Thanks for the whataboutism argument. It really opened my eyes to workers deserve less money.

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#99
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, why did people create companies for the past 300 years ? Why did people become entrepreneur ? They didn't have anywhere close to 400 times their workers salary, must have been a miserable life What's the point of it all when you have enough money to sustain your entire genealogy tree from the birth of earth to the heat death of the universe ? These people are clinically ill

Tech driven automation is creating opportunities that didn't exist before and there is way more competition. CEOs have a crucial impact on company and are paid in stocks. Does this article and related figure accounts for all the failed startups CEOs whose stock turned out to be worthless?

I want to say: so what ?

Getting paid 50 times your employees isn't enough ? You need to get paid 400 times their salary ? Why stop there ? 800 times ?

The invisible hand doesn't exist and without regulations these things will get worse and worse

Re: CEO pay skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs paid 399 times as much vs. worker

#100

Maybe Karl Marx had a point? Sure, communist revolutions of the 20th century produced suboptimal results, but only because violent psychopaths were in power. We need democratic socialism. Maybe Bernie Sanders has right ideas.

I think Polanyi had a point. The creation of the market and the economy as abstract entities to which other parts of life should be subservient - a surprisingly modern idea - is the root of the evil in modern liberalism - itself a concept mostly disconnected from its root.

What I always find surprising is that, as soon as it’s made abstract enough, even humanist and rational people are apparently ready to defend the worst atrocities.

Just set your priorities in the right orders. If you find yourself defending a system which see sick people die in the street in one of the richest country in the world and history, you are probably in the wrong.

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