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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

#81

Post by AlexandrB »

sanedigital wrote: post #60
adamedw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could go to the people who produce the value in the first place: the workers.

I know, they could use the market to determine the rate at which that wealth transfer occurs. And then they could distribute it biweekly via direct deposit. They might even call it a salary!

Companies fight tooth and nail to keep the market from encroaching on their decisions about worker pay. Why do you think there's a taboo or outright ban on talking about compensation at many companies?

I wonder how many companies have "friendly" no-poaching agreements with each other like what Apple, Google, and co had[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

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

#82

Post by wpasc »

arcturus17 wrote: post #66

Like most people I think that this is ludicrous, but could someone give a shot at playing devil's advocate and justifying this? Are competent CEOs so much harder to get, do they really produce a 1,460% more value compared to '78, etc.?

My devil's advocate take is that this is downstream of corporate consolidation. Corporate consolidation IMO has become easier with greater economies of scale achievable with far better communication, shipping networks, and generally global connectivity.

If CEO's of today on average leading companies that are orders of magnitude larger than in the 70's (CEO has 100-1000 people in the company in 70's vs 1,000-100,000 today), then the jump in pay isn't surprising. If the CEO is driving the direction of a company and those decisions affect orders of magnitude more workers and orders of magnitude more revenue, then it follows that they can get a higher salary. They might not be any better, but the stakes of their decisions are bigger.

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

#83

Post by friedman23 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #46
friedman23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not their creation, it's their idea. The employees are the ones who literally created it. Even if you assume all CEOs are founders, the thought that they deserve more than two orders of magnitude more compensation for leasing their idea is wild.

> It's not their creation, it's their idea.

Except in the cases where they literally create it? Every single idea and business started with a small group of people and often just a single person. Sometimes they create it, sometimes they pay someone else to create it.

If they pay someone to create it, do you think that person should take ownership in the company? Ok, maybe they should, but of course if they are taking part ownership they have to accept less cash right? Turns out most people don't want to deal with that risk and don't want to be paid in equity.

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

#84

Post by friedman23 »

saucepines wrote: post #54
friedman23 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they can create everything why do they need employees?

To expand the scale so they can provide their creation to more people. If the employees can gain control most creators will simply choose to keep their creations small in scale so they can maintain their freedom. Often the only way people are convinced to part with this control is copious amounts of money.

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

#85

Post by Firmwarrior »

lm28469 wrote: post #55
ttoinou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty definition is a relative definition. Hence you're measuring inequalities, not wealth

Well that's what the discussion was about in the first place wasn't it ? The inequalities between CEOs and workers grew, one side lives in absolute poverty, the other in absolute opulence The poor are still too poor to live properly and the rich are too rich to count, that's not how they sold us capitalism is it ? Wasn't it supposed to even out inequalities ? Money trickling down to the poorest ? Why are there still…

Our patron saint has this to say about it

> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty. [9] And if there are people getting rich by tricking consumers or lobbying the government for anti-competitive regulations or tax loopholes, then let's stop them. Not because it's causing economic inequality, but because it's stealing. [10]

> If all you have is statistics, it seems like that's what you need to fix. But behind a broad statistical measure like economic inequality there are some things that are good and some that are bad, some that are historical trends with immense momentum and others that are random accidents. If we want to fix the world behind the statistics, we have to understand it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.

http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html

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

#86

Post by whatshisface »

ilyt wrote: post #53
loandbehold wrote: post #49

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.

Psychopats have unreasonably high efficiency in convincing people they should lead them tho

Taken alone that sentence applies equally well to any system of government.

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

#87

Post by paulgb »

arcturus17 wrote: post #66

Like most people I think that this is ludicrous, but could someone give a shot at playing devil's advocate and justifying this? Are competent CEOs so much harder to get, do they really produce a 1,460% more value compared to '78, etc.?

I’m partial to the Lake Wobegon explanation, which gets a mention in the article:

> Alluding to the fictional town in the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, Clifford (2017) describes the Lake Wobegon world of setting CEO compensation that fuels its growth: Every firm wants to believe its CEO is above average and therefore needs to be correspondingly remunerated.

In other words, CEO pay isn’t just a way of attracting CEO talent, it’s also a way of signaling to investors that you have a good CEO. After all, who wants to invest in a company whose CEO (by the compensation committee’s own reckoning) is worse than average! This is rational for an individual company, but has the aggregate effect of inflating CEO compensation for everyone.

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

#88

Post by squaredot »

jrm4 wrote: post #79
squaredot wrote: post #70

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.

Overpaid with respect to what? The comparison CEO-worker is not explicitly stated, but it's not very hidden either.

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

#89

Post by ectopod »

uoaei wrote: post #38
jokethrowaway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is: How much money are the shareholders happy to pay for a CEO to accomodate their level of risk and their level of confidence in the returns? If they could pay less, they would.

Name one company where shareholders get to vote on CEO pay.

Its not uncommon in the UK but the big investors tend to be funds and their managers are part of the same class that benefits from ever increasing executive compensation. So they rarely vote against.

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

#90

Post by coinbasetwwa »

loandbehold wrote: post #49

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.

[dead]
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