The greedy behavior that leads to the kind of inequality faced by today's society is now so well established that it has become hard to recognize for what it truly is.
The fact that this article's author seems to find it novel to trickle down the proceeds of the company to the bulk of it's employees is a pretty good indication of that.
So in other words: It no longer requires any malice to pay this way, as it's just a cultural norm in the business world.
By the way, it's also a cultural norm in the US to complain about the lack of generosity among those richer than you, and yet spend almost 100% of your salary helping yourself, when you could just as easily spend it on those less fortunate. Charitable donation is trivially easy, even easier than raising the minimum wage at your company. Yet how many people in these comments are highly-paid millennials who would rather buy the newest iPhone than donate that money to those in need?
If we want to understand the psychology of those at the "top," we need only look no further than ourselves. Unless you're at the bottom, you're also at the top as far as people less fortunate than you are concerned.
Sure. But I don't think this is a sufficient defense — at the extremes, cultural norms can result in horrific things even though individual actors may not be motivated by malice.
> By the way, it's also a cultural norm in the US to complain about the lack of generosity among those richer than you, and yet spend almost 100% of your salary helping yourself, when you could just as easily spend it on those less fortunate.
There's definitely an incongruity between people's expectations of those above them and what they contribute themselves. We should all give more! But even if I were to donate 100% of my salary, it would barely dent things for those 500 employees.
When we complain about people above us, we're (usually) not chastising individuals but calling for systemic solutions to these issues. The overarching goal isn't for people to donate more of their resources, but to structure things in a more equitable way so that people don't rely on individual generosity in the first place.
There's a lot more people like you than billionares in the world, though.
............ THAT'S THE PROBLEM
And if you're talking about wealth... Well, having all the world's billionares give up their money at once wouldn't have much of a positive impact either. (The 1% in the US - not exactly billionaires, $10,000,000 puts you there - had about 35% of US wealth in 2007)
At which point you are better served by targeting the cultural norm and the harm it does, rather than shaming the individuals following it as malicious. Not only is it more accurate, but it's more effective.
> When we complain about people above us, we're (usually) not chastising individuals but calling for systemic solutions to these issues.
I wish this was the case, but 99% of the rhetoric I see is chastising individuals.
Businesses _shouldn't_ exist for the purpose of making the executive team and the shareholders rich at the expense of the employees. American dream or not, businesses serve a purpose in _society_ not just the tiny fraction of society who have the skills to start and run the business.
The goal now is to make executives and shareholders disgustingly rich, and use the government to subsidize the underpaid workforce that generates that wealth. We've created a socialist state for corporations.
Analyzing this situation in terms of a qualitatively homogeneous property differing between people only in magnitude (income or wealth) is a mistake, in my opinion. (And so is taking a psychological approach.)
The most important thing the people at the ‘top’ have here is not any particular amount of money or income, but a radically different relationship to labor and the workplace than the mass of people who work under them. They have special powers (e.g., the power to set wages) and their income comes not only from producing things or providing services using their brains and muscles, but through owning and managing capital. At the very peak of the top, there are owners of capital of whom virtually no management at all is required.
It's because there are people, and of necessity a minority of them, in such a position at all, that the interests of society (as well as its privileges) are divided in such a way as to produce the inequality we have.
When wage laborers _do_ have control or input over things like wages, we _don't_ see the same enormous gaps between the highest and lowest paid employees at those firms. And in the case of that more agreeable outcome, too, the cause is not psychological— it's not that wage laborers are kinder or more generous people than executives, but that their position entails certain interests which are different from those of executives, and given the chance they will guide the firms they work at accordingly.
But the comments here are primarily attacking the "greed" of people richer than them, who would rather spend more money on themselves than on those in need. They're making a psychological argument, and so I am responding in kind by pointing out that these very complainers are hypocritically spending their paychecks the same way: on themselves, not on those in need.
I know you think you’re arguing against me, but what you described supports my position.
It doesn't matter if it is hard to recognize, if you are unable to understand something then you are by definition incompetent with respect to the task or idea.