Let me take a blind guess - majoring in humanities or liberal arts?
And if yes, then history is full of examples of “fun” communist regimes bring to those people.
What Were We Thinking?
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to see how large numbers of such executives can all be wrong, you need only glance over at the front page of HN as of late, at the daily layoffs mea culpa letters.
Yes I am sure you could do better and for only half the pay
Show me the money and let's find out.
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#23> "Unless we have reached the end point of humankind’s moral development, it is pretty certain that the average educated human of the twenty-third century will look back at the average educated human of the twenty-first century and ask incredulously about a considerable number of our most cherished moral and political axiom" While I generally sympathize with the article I think there's one issue where the ethics are…
I think there are a few that we can easily see right now if we try to step outside ourselves. The typical western toilet is one filled with drinking water which we then pay money to try to process and recover the drinking water. All while other humans go without drinking water.
Eh? The humans who have potable water in their toilets are not stealing it from others. Drinking water (and the infrastructure that provides it) is not a zero sum game.
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
If "the vast majority" of fortune 500 CEOs are overpaid, why do boards continue to hire people that get paid so much? Why do shareholders put up with it? Couldn't they just say, "We will pay half what the current CEO makes, who wants the job?" and get an endless line of qualified applicants? Or is it that when billions of dollars are on the line, quibbling over tens of millions is far too risky? I don't know about an…
> I don't think the market is wrong. But the market can be wrong! In many situations. In fact, it's only "right" under the most ideal of circumstances, perfect information, perfect competition etc. Then there's the question about what kind of right we're actually talking about here. To an ideal market, right is distributing resources to optimize profit. But if some people are less profitable than others, that clashes…
I grant your point: Given imperfect information and imperfect competition, the market for top-tier CEO compensation is probably wrong by some factor.
Even if we agree with that, then what?
Put another way: Who has a greater right than the equity holders of those companies to set CEO pay levels/limits?
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have a look at how the CEOs get their position in the first place; it's more of a network of people using their current positions to extract money while jerking each other off. It's not really a question of market effect or competence, it's more that if you try to find someone who asks for less and isn't in the network, the existing powers sink the stock price, buy shares and appoint a highly paid buddy to solve the…
If it's so easy go start your own Fortune 500 company, or figure out how to "jerk someone off" to get the job. I think your cynical vision of how operating a large business works is wildly incorrect and is a left-wing fantasy.
There are a historical handful of fortune 500 CEOs that didn't start out with immense wealth.
No matter how easy it is, I believe that success is more dependant on staying in line with the existing network than any real merit.
Unfortunately the market value of a handjob from a non millionaire is closer to that of a big Mac than it is a C level position.
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#26Let me take a blind guess - majoring in humanities or liberal arts? And if yes, then history is full of examples of “fun” communist regimes bring to those people.
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Re: What Were We Thinking?
#27Ah, the rehashed CEO vs. employee pay statistic. Yes, this may be true for CEOs at the largest of companies which have a lot of employees. But the vast majority of companies are not multinationals. But I agree that the vast majority of fortune 500 CEOs seem overpaid relative to what they do or skill. I'm sure it's possible to find someone who can do a equal or even better job for only $500k of compensation, not tens…
If "the vast majority" of fortune 500 CEOs are overpaid, why do boards continue to hire people that get paid so much? Why do shareholders put up with it? Couldn't they just say, "We will pay half what the current CEO makes, who wants the job?" and get an endless line of qualified applicants? Or is it that when billions of dollars are on the line, quibbling over tens of millions is far too risky? I don't know about an…
The market when it comes to CEOs is people known to the board. There’s no open recruitment, no selection criteria, no blind resumes. It’s basically nepotism/cronyism.
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#28We need a new "Wealth of Nations" that incorporates modern physical concepts into the economic picture. "The Wealth of Planets" is the obvious extension, but it's not a concept that nationalist economics is really ready to embrace, as the natural conclusion is that nation-state borders are highly arbitrary in nature relative to things like primary photosynthetic production, the availability of food supplies and raw materials, etc.
This all becomes a lot clearer if you think about what a human colony on Mars would have to cope with. Assuming importing food from Earth is implausible, there's going to be an obvious limit to how many people each colony can support, determined largely by how much food each colony can produce (which in turn will depend on a robust air and water supply). 20th-century economic models imported from Earth won't make much sense in that situation, regardless of whether they're lefty or righty in nature.
Likely the next major stage in economic thinking will be the adoption of ecological economics, and in the quantitative sense, something like the extension of the thinking of Yale's G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991) on lake ecosystems to the entire human enterprise on planet Earth.
Unfortunately the social sciences and humanities (where economics seems to have found its academic berth, as well as in the business schools) are not going to be willing to adopt this perspective, as it means they'd have to learn biology, chemistry and physics. The alternative is to yank the economics departments out of their comfortable little holes and stick them in the natural sciences division...
The poor economists, just imagine them having to constrain their models in accordance with principles like the conservation of mass and energy...
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#29> My point is that all production is social production. The productive assets of every age are the joint product of all preceding ages, and all those born into the present are legitimately joint heirs of those assets.
TLDR if you're trying to grapple through the 1,300 words leading up to the author's first point, this is it -- the wealth of a nation... that it exists, I suppose (ignoring that they occasionally have to get rebuilt from nothing).
The introductory essay has no examples, it is just a long quasi-theoretical discussion of things like causation and value. These concepts are completely intractable by real economic theory (because an economy is a complex dynamic system run by humans). So you need to look at the real world. What actually happens to the economy in nations where privately held wealth doesn't exist? What happens to the people? That is what you have to reckon with, morally. This ABC implies fairness stuff shows pretty well the amount of effort that was put into this.
... the piece is SO LONG.
Re: What Were We Thinking?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think the market is wrong. But the market can be wrong! In many situations. In fact, it's only "right" under the most ideal of circumstances, perfect information, perfect competition etc. Then there's the question about what kind of right we're actually talking about here. To an ideal market, right is distributing resources to optimize profit. But if some people are less profitable than others, that clashes…
I grant your point: Given imperfect information and imperfect competition, the market for top-tier CEO compensation is probably wrong by some factor. Even if we agree with that, then what? Put another way: Who has a greater right than the equity holders of those companies to set CEO pay levels/limits?
From the article (approx. quote)
> compensation to the top 25 hedge fund managers equal the combined salaries of all kindergarten teachers in the country
Those are people who deserves (have the right) to be compensated better for their work. It's a failing of the market, the system, a moral and cultural failing that they are not.
I refuse to belive we can not tweak our economies to value peoples work more fairly.