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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

I would expect compensation to rise substantially under this rule to account for the new risk of the position, from the Fortune 50 all the way down.

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I have no intuition for this.

Compensation is already so stupendously high that I just can't imagine marginal dollars one way or the other, uniformly applied to all CEO positions, having any effect on a CEOs willingness to do their job at all. Maybe fewer, or different people would want to be CEOs if it came with this risk, but given that I have no clue what drives current compensation other than a zero-sum competition between companies for scarce abilities (what are you gonna do if the salary is not high enough, not be a CEO at all? Nothing comes close salarywise, so being a CEO at a lower salary should still be your best option), I wouldn't want to speculate about it. If it's just companies bidding over who gets the CEOs, then it's limited by how much they can pay and the size of the pool.

And I just can't see the size of the pool changing if you increase the salary. There can't possibly be any dynamic range left at these levels.

Its like: I'll pay you infinity dollars to do this. Yeah? Well that other guy will pay you infinity plus one! That's how it feels from down here on mean income. Maybe I lack perspective and a bigger yacht is more of an incentive than it seems.

This headline only applies to the largest 350 companies in the US. According to BLS data there are 200,000+ people in the US with the job title CEO and the average salary is around $180,000. EPI is constantly publishing updated versions of this report and beating the "CEOs are paid too much" drum like a wind up monkey.

Look at you for doing homework and having an independent mindset to find your own truths rather than blindly follow others... what's wrong with you? That's not allowed here. This is capitalism bad only allowed rhetoric.

Or maybe we’re cutting down on cognitive overload because we can’t independently dig down into a rabbit hole each and every time we read an article.

Also, none of what was said contradicts the notion that the wage gap is getting wider.

But the conversation makes it seems like all CEOs are the big bad boogey men out to eat your children's cookies when they're asleep. There are lots of cuntbag CEOs out there, don't get me wrong. But profiling is bad. There are plenty of small business c corps out there that have owners who really don't make all that much more than their employees.

I would expect businesses to split up. It's physically impossible to keep 100,000 people from ever committing crimes. (By comparison, that's a mid-sized city. How busy are the police forces in a mid-sized city on a typical day, and how many crimes go uncaught?) You'd likely see one CEO after another go to jail until there's nobody with an ego big enough to take the position, at which point the company splits up until it reaches manageable chunks.

...which may not be a bad thing. Lock up all the sociopaths and narcissists, and improve competition too!

If we are going to start locking up people for not stopping others from committing crimes without their knowledge, why stop with CEO’s? How about parents of kids that commit felonies? Teachers that don’t stop bullying.

Not a society I want to live in.

Those other cases don't generally involve the person incentivizing the other person to engage in illegal behavior and when it does they generally already face penalties under law. While there are some problems with the purposed law, then needs to be penalties for creating the incentives.

Incentives basic as “not getting laid off” cause illegal behavior, so it seems nigh unworkable to me. In any event, it appears to be a rather fundamental change that should not be pursued lightly.

I don´t know what they do in the U.S., but here in Uruguay the parents ARE responsible for kids that commit severe felonies (unless they´re old enough to be judged themselves).

It´s not usually applied though.

The root comment said "company wide illegal behavior". That's not the same as "nobody ever commits a crime".

And then goes on to say "any company wide illegal behavior", and states that even if they did not know about it, it was their responsibility to know, and they would still go to jail for it. Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me that is the same as "nobody ever commits a crime".

> And then goes on to say "any company wide illegal behavior", and states that even if they did not know about it, it was their responsibility to know, and they would still go to jail for it. Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me that is the same as "nobody ever commits a crime".

If it's happening company wide that points to an incentive structure (created by internal policy) that may be misaligned. The operative phrase is company wide which indicates a systemic issue.

And/or the scale of companies to shrink dramatically to the point that the CEO is only 2-3 degrees away from any employee instead of 6+.

I think that would be a good outcome. We would be better off with many small companies.

Why? Economies of scale can make things a lot cheaper

Sure. Up to the point where the big guys are stifling progress. I was around when the PC industry wasn’t dominated by MS and Apple and I much preferred having a lot of smaller companies producing innovative stuff. It was more chaotic and less Convenient but much more interesting and fun.

Nothing stopping those smaller companies coming to arrangements to keep those economies of scale.

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