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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.

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.

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> Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium.

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.

> "The market" is amoral

Yeah, exactly. Fairness in the marketplace is purely a math problem, no morality involved.

But fairness without morality is just a nonsense. It’s an equilibrium. fairness requires some moral perspective.

> fairness requires some moral perspective

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 you don't understand the difference between equality and equity.

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.

I take you point in part (justice is the stronger version) but fairness as you describe only occurs in social animals which actually do have a more complex definition of fairness than simple equality. Chimp ‘morals’ would include the notion that high status individuals “deserve more” - which I think is simple moralising which goes beyond equality

> justice is the stronger version

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 feel like you’re using the word “fair” in an econ 101 sense, not in the way most people use it.

“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.

> Most people consider child labor unfair

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.

Comparing wild outliers seems seems like expectation grooming.

How about lowest pay at company compared to highest? It can cope with variations in industries and even among companies.

The often-cited notion that a warehouse worker has even remotely the same responsibility as a company CEO is just straight-up fiction. Ergo, their jobs are incomparable.

I'm not so sure. Stakes may be higher but feels like CEO performance doesn't correlate strongly to education, past experience, class, or anything really. So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.

> So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.

Do you think any shareholders would vote for such a strategy?

My guess is corporations will fight any sane limits to their power and accumulation of wealth. And those at the top of corporations even more so. Which is why we have a government to balance the needs of the many against the consolidated power of the few who would exploit them

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