I don't want this to happen, but as this continues over the next couple of decades, people are going to start thinking about Robespierre and start building guillotines.
CEO productivity hasn't increased a single bit in the last 100 years, and worker productivity has increased a lot. For our efforts, we have to return to our offices after asking to continue to work from home and after proving that telecommuting en masse works just fine. With a perfect performance evaluation we get raises that are less than inflation. And worst of all, CEOs and other executive pay increases dramatically each and every year.
At some point a critical number of people are going to notice this happening. I already see people talking about it in a few online communities.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but generally, the worse things get, the worse the outcome will be.
It’s such a shame that the rule makers do not see that if the system does not benefit the majority then they will be desperate enough to expand the rule set with violent acts and ultimately bring it down.
French Revolution is definitely a display of lack of freedom followed by the rule of absolute power.
I have this hope that in a few hundred years when we look back at this stage of history, and in particular look back at this absurd level of economic inequality, it will seem about as silly as having kings or emperors be the basis of our political systems. Not in the sense that it does not make sense historically, but in the sense that it is utterly archaic and obviously both irrational and unfair, and will never again be the case.
I hope so too. The disappointing revelation that follows those reveries is that, if it does come to pass, we won't be around to see it. It reminds me of Why We Can't Wait by Dr. King...
>Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait
I remember hearing Matt Damon protest that CEOs made 100x more than their lowest paid workers. I did some quick math based on production crew salaries and at $20m (plus residuals) per movie he was making around 800x the lowest paid FTEs, even those in a union.
Football players and pop stars get their own share of grief (remember the song "Money for Nothin'"?). Probably more than an appropriate 1/33 as much grief.
Because not everyone can be a professional football player or entertainer. Anyone can be a decision maker be it good or bad. Also, a football player or entertainer can also be a CEO. A great example of this is Beats By Dre, with Dr Dre being a CEO coupled with also being a major celebrity and selling the company he help found to Apple for 3 billion. We also have examples of athletes like Rob Dyrdek becoming a celebrity. Rarely do we see the inverse (e.g. shark tank with Cuban, Musk)
Is it fair that Joan shows up to work everyday at the Amazon warehouse busting her back, while Jeff works from his private plane making more money in few hours than Joan will ever see in a lifetime? That's what amazes me...
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, politicians are not especially well paid. The President makes $400k; Senators and representatives get $174k. Top GS scale employees make $144k.
It's certainly nothing to sneeze at, but many of them were making more before they went into politics. And most of them have to maintain two homes, one in DC and another in their district. It's a small multiple of US average worker salary, but less than one order of magnitude (except for the President, who makes as much as ~12 average Americans).
Most are rich, but they were rich before. It's expensive to go into politics. It's not impossible to get into Congress without being rich, but most are.
Yea no. What politicians make on paper is a moot point. There's a reason they all listen to the special interests and lobbyists and not their constituents.
Then there's the regulatory capture of being a politician then going to work for the companies that lobbied them.
These guys earn it. If I pay for a concert of I pay for a game I know I'm contributing to that celebrities salary because that person is responsible for a huge portion of the entertainment. I do so willingly.
When I pay for a product I want the majority of my payment to go to the workers responsible for realizing the product not the CEO telling the workers what to do. We all know a company is destroyed if you remove all the workers, but not if you remove a CEO. The same cannot be said of celebrities.
Additionally I'm a fucking worker as are most people here. So of course it's a problem for me if the CEO is taking something that isnt considered a fair share by workers. I'm also 100 percent fucking aware of what my CEO actually does and how much he actually contributes.
What amazes me is the leaps of logic that CEOs formulate in order to justify their crimes and lie to themselves.
A concert also falls apart without stage crew, yet we still accept that the star in the light gets 20000 times their hourly pay. And while “Spice girls” would certainly be different if they’d chosen a different cast of girls for the positions, I highly doubt it would have been fundamentally different[0] Yet Amazon would not be here today without Bezos, Facebook would not be here without Zuckerberg and Apple wouldn’t be here without Jobs. I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together, or the person sorting the package into the right bin before the robots at Amazon sort those into the shipping box that eventually ends up at your door, so you can use it to like the latest SoMe posts from your favorite boy/girl-band.
[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
> I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together
I think it's quite narrow minded and downright evil to paint a picture as if this is what I'm doing.
I NEVER said the CEO doesn't matter. But certainly he doesn't matter as much as you and their salaries imply. Jobs died, guess what happened to Apple? Nothing. Steve jobs matters, but along with every other CEO in the world, if he suddenly dies, life goes on and not much happens to the company.
Additionally what the hell is this garbage about assembly workers pushing buttons? That's just one step in a highly complex process. There's designers, engineers, programmers and assembly workers. All of these people combined contribute far more than Steve Jobs saying, "build me a touch screen phone." Certainly you need someone to give the order but in no way is this person a critical part of the equation. You saying this is a deliberate distortion of what I am saying. The best word to describe it is: lies.
>[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
Yeah great job covering your ass while distorting and twisting my point. No dude. CEO's as they stand today deserve far less than celebrities. The entire operation falls apart without a celebrity. Not so for the CEO.
CEOs are an important part the equation for a product. But they are also the least important when compared to the rest of pipeline. The CEO is replaceable, the pipeline is not.
Football players destroy their bodies for 2-4 years (average career length) of ~$860,000/year (median NFL salary). Be angry at football team owners instead.
It is also possible that globalization requires new management and coordination skills on a level that was never there before.
To be able to make your company successful is one thing but to make it successful in multiple regions with globally distributed supply chains is a completely different story where complexities increase x299?
Your comment doesn't really object. Do you know how many average workers are getting paid right now for doing basically nothing? A high percentage of average "jobs" in US are a form of UBI. Some are doing great things, some are kicking cans, CEOs are no different, CEOs are not robots (yet?).
But is the calculation correct? For example according to these guys, the CEO of Aberocrombie & Fitch made $12 MM while the median worker made $1820, resulting in a ratio of 6565:1 [1]
I'm curious what you think would be wrong with their calculations. A ratio of 299:1 will certainly include some large corporations with high ratios, but also many more smaller companies with substantially less revenue to pay their CEOs.
How can the median salary of an Aberocrombie employee be $1820? Per year. This is less than $1/hour, many times less than the minimum legal salary in the US.
Out of curiosity, I just googled the average salary for Aberocrombie & Fitch. Indeed.com shows $23k for a “Stocking Associate” and $38k for a warehouse worker [1]. Hardly Silicon Valley-level salaries, but way above the bogus $1820 figure these guys used to get their 6565:1 ratio.
The economy is not a fixed pie, but unless it's the CEO driving the productivity gains of a company, there's no real reason to give them a more and more outsized share of the revenue. It could go to the workers, or the shareholders.
People have fundamentally different worldviews. Some people refuse to accept anybody having nice things unless everybody can have them. I personally don't care for dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator, I'd rather focus on helping bring people up where feasible.
I'll definitely agree that that applies for most people, including myself. Also don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I was more saying when people aim for equality, some take that to mean dragging everyone down first, and some take that to mean pulling everyone up first.
This should be a reminder to compensate workers more broadly. If companies don’t do this, taxes + government redistribution will. Or people will revolt… they’d have little to lose.
Everybody is up in arms about this, but it makes sense. The difference between hiring the best CEO and the next best CEO might only be 0.5% growth but on a scale of billions that is still a lot of money. More importantly, the cost of hiring a bad CEO is that you can lose it all.
This means that CEOs with proven experience can drive up the price of CEOs drastically.
Meanwhile if you hire 1000 people to work in your stores you are going to get an average and getting a little better than average is what you can hope for, so individual workers cannot press the price up.
Nothing is stopping you from sending an application to become the CEO of Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft and noting that even though you might not be their ideal candidate you would be willing to do the job at 2X their median employee. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to save some money.
These days it seems most of the extravagant CEO pay is going towards eccentrics wanting to build rockets, though I’m guessing a lot of them are more boring and just buying huge boats/mansions and wait staff etc, and then investing the rest in letting family and friends get by without working.
They compare top 500 CEOs (S&P 500) vs average worker. How about comparing apples to apples? What's the compensation of an average CEO from some random small company?
Also total compensation is misleading measure, it's not money on the table. Often just stock options that may or may not vest in future.
Sounds reasonable. I mean, if I got to set my own pay then how would I do it? Ok, so let's work this out, hmm?
"In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that the median pay for executives at 300 of the biggest U.S. companies reached $13.7 million, up from $12.8 million in 2019. The highest paid CEO out of companies on the S&P 500 in 2020 was Paycom CEO Chad Richison. For companies not on the S&P 500 list, Palantir CEO Alexander Carp and DoorDash CEO Tony Xu earned the most in 2020, with pay packages of $1.1 billion and $1 billion respectively." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation_in_the_...)
If the workers became CEOs, paid like the median of the 300, that would be $2.2E15 (note exponential notation). The US GDP is something like $2.1E13. So, no, workers cannot become CEOs.
Executive compensation has grown significantly faster than wages, corporate profits, the stock market, and the economy for at least three decades. (Up something like 18% annually since 1978.) (https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-surged-14-i...)
It is CEO hatred culture which is being actively developed by socialists in hope to promote socialism: a very predictable desire to control the population by eliminating opportunity and thus free-thinkers and overachievers: forced equality where everyone should wear the same uniform, the same haircut, and make the same 15$ per month no matter your skills, abilities, or the situation at hand, with all Olympians in national Olympiads getting the same iron medals regardless of the results.
Fortunately unachievable in US in the near future.
Most certainly not, Медвежонок, and I doubt it will become one in the near future (although some aspects of it are already here). Nevertheless, it's always good to highlight socialist propaganda.
"hate" or "hatred" - very strong words that make me say "Yes, exactly right.", - in response to your first question.
I would even point out that only deeply disturbed individuals can hate people they know nothing about (well, nothing other than what was shoved down their throats by propaganda channels)
I realize that cringing obsequiousness is a great human tradition in the relationships between those without power and those with, but I do have to point out that, when push comes to shove, your betters will never remember your service.
I know it's possible that some time in the future I might realize that I have been a fool all this time. However, it is also possible that alternatively, you might realize the same. That moment has yet to come for either of us. So here we stand.
>Remember kids: if you study hard, get good grades, go to a good college, get a job, work hard, never take a sick day, live within your means and do what you're told ... then one day your boss might go to space
It would be nice if we could use some of the unimaginable wealth of these CEOs to improve society, but enough people still believe in the myth of Horatio Alger that we choose not to tax billionaires because we somehow think it will discourage people from becoming billionaires.
CEO productivity hasn't increased a single bit in the last 100 years, and worker productivity has increased a lot. For our efforts, we have to return to our offices after asking to continue to work from home and after proving that telecommuting en masse works just fine. With a perfect performance evaluation we get raises that are less than inflation. And worst of all, CEOs and other executive pay increases dramatically each and every year.
At some point a critical number of people are going to notice this happening. I already see people talking about it in a few online communities.
I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but generally, the worse things get, the worse the outcome will be.