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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Using mechanical turk to test consumer purchasing behavior is a meaningless exercise. Consumers care about price and quality, first and foremost. To fully explain the ethical practices of executive pay vs. employee compensation when someone is buying soap or cat food is not easy.

However what I love about the free market is that everyone can experiment. If you can find competent executives willing to work way under market-rates to sell your soap and cat food as a for-profit charity, I welcome it!

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https://www.thefashionlaw.com/visibility-is-central-to-a-suc...

Only, consumers actually care about ethics and that can actually hit your bottom line.

That is an overly simplistic and utterly senseless perspective. The overwhelming majority of consumers could give a sh*t about these things when they're actually shopping for a product. These are the things people care about when being judged by others, not when deciding how to spend their money.

> That is an overly simplistic and utterly senseless perspective.

That's a curious response to an explicit example of consumers not simply optimizing for cost and quality.

Your first sentence is pretty exaggerated (and borders on ad hominem). Regardless, even if I agree with your second sentence, I can still rationally disagree that it has no effect worth considering, either economically, morally, or even just personally. They aren't mutually exclusive, logically.

Maybe I'm in the minority but I don't see any ethical concern with market rate CEO pay.

Perhaps a more generic "value alignment" would better capture both the study du jour and the Nike example.

I think there is a minority but highly poisonous ideology (in that its effect is outsize compared to how many people believe it) that essentially goes "market = ethical". There is certainly some not-unreasonable argument that market rate CEO pay is not unethical, and that version of the argument may be the one in your head. However, I believe the majority of arguments to that effect are unreasonable. I believe that the exact shape of the wealth pyramid, as produced by natural market forces, is one of the great horrors destroying the common person's feelings of satisfaction or even simple happiness - one of those things that is ignored because "personal responsibility", or other oversimplifications you might call the tonal opposite of a platitude. Historically, that pressure is eventually released horrifically. In modern times, I'm not sure what's going to happen, because we have significantly stronger walls on the pressure vessel (mostly a natural outcome, not maliciously designed). E.g. the many little distractions we'd rather take comfort in than engaging in the nightmare of revolution (entertainment, food); for others less fortunate, the all-consuming distraction of just staying above water; the simple distance between the people and the wealthy, and the layers of abstraction in their interactions with each other; the military and police. Have we engineered a perpetual-misery machine, that keeps things just perfectly in balance to avoid an explosion?

I don't care about the wealth pyramid. I care about freedom. If I have skills and a company wants to pay me $XYZ freely for my skills, the government shouldn't be able to arbitrarily cap what I can be paid. Obviously I dislike income taxes as well, but I would rather an income tax than an income-cap.

The poisonous ideology - punishing success - is your own.

From the article you linked:

> That was not the case according to Nike’s chairman and chief executive at the time Phil Knight, who told the New York Times in 1998 that he “truthfully [did not] think that there has been a material impact on Nike sales by the human rights attacks,” and pointed instead, to “the financial crisis in Asia, where the company had been expanding sales aggressively, and its failure to recognize a shifting consumer preference for hiking shoes.”

If executive pay is prioritized over employee retention, prices may drop but quality (or quantity) inevitably suffers.

The problem is that by the time drop in quality exceeds consumer tolerances, the original executives are long gone.

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