[flagged]
I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that…
Limits on compensation are ineffective at achieving their goals under the best of circumstances, and the inevitable "unintended" consequences of further government manipulation in the market place would likely have negative effects.
Did I say the feds should set the limit? Why can't a respectable board set respectable limits? Cause they don't give a fuck about anything except the stock price EVEN if it means that others suffer in their wake.
That's why. That's the side you're on. Miss me with that libertarian Thiel bullshit.
Taxation is not and will never be in a place that serves the commonwealth, rather it will always align with those closer to power.
Have you not been paying attention?
I think we, collectively, as humans well define some vague idea as to what's acceptable and what's not, because no matter how smart you are, the realities that humans in motion provide are a couple more orders of magnitude more complex than your SPA repo. And it should be.
Between more ticket sales, higher ticket prices, playoff tickets, more merch sales, and possibly better TV revenue, a player that good can absolutely be worth it.
How do you determine these absolutes? Why is your 'should' and 'fair' set at whatever value you're using, and not whatever value someone else determined?
The only 'fair' is what someone is willing to pay.
If you aren't willing to pay someone 200m... then don't. Why do you care if someone else is willing and does?
I think too often people let the "morals" of the market replace actual human morals, and assume that because the market is "free" or essentially some uncontrollable algorithm, anything it does is moral by human standards. It's easy to throw your hands up and say "oh, well that's just what the market will bear" and assume all moral responsibility has been accounted for. But I disagree.
We have a different value system.
This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?
> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.
The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.
Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.
And if you think you are and you're using the "free market" as a factor, well then I'm sure you think BTC should of ever been worth 60k or that Tesla should be worth $900 a share.
It's incredible that people plant their morality within the confines of a "definitely rational market that's definitely not experiencing a bubble".
You're entitled to your opinion, and by all means share it—but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
Agree to definitely disagree. No apologies.
Again, it doesn't matter if I'm smarter, more efficient, or "more important" than 5 janitors; what matters is how much money I can help the company make and how hard I am to replace. If I'm enabling the company to make 10X more money than the efforts of a janitor could yield and I'm very hard to replace, then I see no reason why I shouldn't be paid more than 5 janitors combined (granted, this isn't a great comparison because a janitor is more of a cost center, but you get the point). It has nothing to do with who the janitors are as people or who I am as a person, it's purely about money. Also where did you get the number 5 from? Why not 6 or 4? This is what I mean when I say this is very arbitrary.
> but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
You seem to believe that companies exist to provide good paying, "fair" jobs, when infact they exist solely to make money. People are paid based on their ability to contribute to this, full stop.
I 100% agree that's it's arbitrary, and my figure wasn't a source of categorical, universal truth, but guess what? The hardest questions in life resides squarely in a GREY area.
I'd even argue that your intense rationality and reliance on systems (no matter how ineffective, or even untrue) is a crutch because, in theory, you will always be at odds with the proletariat.
And what good is that?
It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.
People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).
There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.
Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium. The shareholders think this is a fair salary. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Sure, the salary is high, but it seems commensurate with the value that Amazon generates. Literally 30% of the entire internet runs on AWS, and that's just one part of their business.
Given that Tim Cook earns ~100M yearly, and Satya Nadella is at ~50M yearly, it seems low in comparison.
This is absurd. "The market" is amoral: it's just a collection of human behaviors that are shaped by laws, culture, and customs. All of those can change, the law can change quite easily.
Yeah, exactly. Fairness in the marketplace is purely a math problem, no morality involved.
It does not; you might be thinking of "justice." Even animals have a primal sense of fairness without the moral baggage (e.g. every dog gets one treat, etc.).
I think we have a disagreement here. Justice and fairness, in my view, are two distinct categories. Fairness is not always just (e.g. separate but equal), and justice isn't always fair (e.g. affirmative action). There's occasional overlap, but the overlap is incidental, not contingent.
I don't believe everyone should get the same slice. I just believe that 200 million is a far cry from your salary. If that was untrue you wouldn't be talking shit on a message board.
“The market reached equilibrium” with child labor and indentured servitude. Most people consider child labor unfair, so law/culture/customs changed how the market operates.
Even within the narrow definition of “fairness” in economics you still have externalities. This can become really tricky and require ethical considerations beyond a “pure math” problem.
No, they consider child labor, slavery, indentured servitude, etc. unjust. You could easily come up with a thought experiment where every child (prince or pauper) has to partake in forced labor. This would be fair, but it would still be unjust.
How about lowest pay at company compared to highest? It can cope with variations in industries and even among companies.
Do you think any shareholders would vote for such a strategy?
A classic counter-argument is "well who gets to determine what is fair". I'd counter that with: who determines how much value he, inextricably and uniquely, has added to the company? It's all a farce. No one actually knows (but, oftentimes, the people at the top have bunk reports to justify their position, a privilege line workers don't have).
We need a law which at least begins to lay the foundations for something like: the total all-sources hourly-adjusted compensation for the highest compensated person (employee, contractor, anyone) in any company cannot be more than 1000x the lowest. Regardless of the specifics, the thing I love about that wording is: Amazon absolutely could not afford to pay all of their people $212,000+. But by them saying that, they're in-no-uncertain-terms saying that they're totally unwilling to lower Jassy's comp; drop it to $65M, and now lets try again, can you really not afford to pay everyone at-least $65k? Big Boy Jassy wants a raise, you gotta find the money for everyone; and if you can't, is he really doing that good of a job?
"The talented execs will leave" and go where? Europe? China? Good! The US has massive talent at every traunch of a typical company. Get out! There's dozens of people inside your own company who could do a better job in your seat than you, for a tenth the price, and the only reason they're not sitting there is the gatekeeping every board and exec team participates in to defend their throne.
They were until a few years ago.[1] IIRC, Amazon rolled out an ESPP that was exclusively available to employees not compensated with RSUs.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...
2. Wealth and influence are always used for personal gain. That's kind of the point, no? People are incentivized to work and earn money exactly so they can use it to make their lives better.
2. If your goal in life is to maximize your own self interest without regards to how it impacts the society as a whole, then yes I agree.
Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insufficient resources and services regardless of how much money the rich have. When you frame the issue as wealth inequality, then bringing Bezos's wealth down without any concomitant increase in funding for the poor is a victory as the delta is being reduced. Certainly the rich will need to be taxed more to pay for additional services necessary to improve the lives of the poor and middle class, but explicitly lowering the wealth of the rich doesn't need to be in scope to solve the problems we are facing.
Second, no one wants to admit it and by saying it this comment will get flagged, but people care because they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything complex.
Yep. It's the same jealously when people are paid millions to just shoot a ball in a hoop. Like, no. You shoot a ball into a hoop and have people who will pay $1000 to watch you do it.
One of my favourite punchlines:
Tapping with a hammer $2.00
Knowing where to tap $9,998.00
If my taxes go up to fund plants / warehouses for profitable companies I am objectively worse, am I not?
I don't see why your solution to your taxes should be "let's make the government control even more of the private sector via more regulations".
Get rid of the public sector and everything will move according to value for the customers, instead of who can bribe politicians better.
within their own circles, competition is fierce.. part of the stature of a modern leader is in the dollar value, much less of the ornamentation and ceremonial weaponry of old.. bankers like it better now