That said, CEO salary does strike me as strange. Who needs 8 million per year + stock? I'd think more CEOs would voluntarily take a pay cut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko...
Which is why we need governmental solutions, laws, taxes, etc and can't rely on just good will.
I havent read the book you recomended, but I will check it out. I'd also recomend the book "On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake" as it's a great description of how global elites have largely captured government for their own ends since the gilded age.
Profit, dividends, and buybacks are unpaid wage.
Is that an accurate description of CEOs worth billions of dollars though? How hard are they supposedly working? I'm probably lazier than most of them as an IC with disabilities and non-work interests... but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do.
But you do understand why a popular singer or a football player get that much more than you?
OP is saying "in terms of goals, the end goal should be reduction of poverty, not reduction of rich people".
You're saying "in reality, data says that reduction of rich people tends to correlate with reduction of poverty", thus opening up reduction of rich people as one potential path towards the reduction of poverty.
I don't think it's been definitively demonstrated that the existence of rich people necessitates the existence of poverty. I would agree that, in reality, the creation of rich people tends to also lead to the creation of poverty.
That may be true, but I personally also think curbing the wealth of the extremely wealthy is a worthwhile goal in its own right. It's dangerous to give individuals so much power, which is one of the most common lessons in the last 10,000 years of media and also blatantly obvious from the ways many billionaires (and non-billionaires, frankly) use that money to manipulate, harm, disenfranchise, and silence the public.
Source: Capital by Piketty
They had a rough first 10 years breaking even vs GDP/c under Batista but there was rapid advancement after that until collapse of the Soviet Union.
Secondly they are receiving endowments from many individuals and organizations on top of tuitions and cuts off the top of grants researcher working there receive.
Thirdly they arent just getting simple compound intrest from money setting in a savings account instead they run private equity funds and hedge funds, which are themselves morally suspect
It's his name on the front of the book, but he is not necessarily the primary author. That sounds a little unethical to me.
[0] https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/380231/James-P...
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
Taylor Swift, perhaps? Paul McCartney. You only need one example to disprove the case.
It doesn’t seem ridiculous that if you make something and charge $10 and 100 million people pay you that you’re necessarily doing something unethical.
They’re such outliers that it’s still a safe assumption someone has done something exploitative if they’re a billionaire.
The housing issues are at best partially caused by the rich; plenty of places to put a cheap tar paper shack but for whatever non-market reason you cannot.
Also, at least in the USA, money is efficiently convertible to and from political power. So outsized wealth translates into outsized political power. Satya Nadella having far more money than I means he also has far more political clout than I have.
Are you sure about that? What if he spends that money supporting political figures and economic policies that make your life worse?
If you look at income distribution graphs of the last few decades and the political influence those in the highest percentiles wielded, it's not entirely unfair to question whether this might make the life of the average citizen "worse".
Two words: generational wealth. Such CEO salaries are legacy builders. That's why no-one in their right mind would turn it down.
Accumulated capital is a type of artificial intelligence. Its goal is to defend its existence and accumulate more. When it accumulates more, it needs to defend itself more. This means tax laws and interpretations that benefit a very certain type of citizen. It means international treaties that allow the movement of capital when the local laws become inconvenient. It means business regulations that protects investor instead of consumer interests.
If you let this go on for a certain amount of time, the structure of the economy starts to make no sense to the vast majority of the participants.
And I doubt any of them would take a pay cut.
That is simply not true. Money is not an absolut good, but relative. When a few people own a large portion of money, that affords them the power to decide what people do and usually makes their life worse.
Fortunately the people living in the United States of America have a society of laws and have been to bat against the monopolistic tendencies of unfettered capitalism at least once before.
Maybe a lot of companies (erhm, platform-companies) use unfair market dynamics that should be regulated to yield a fair market place (Eg. European platform directives)?
For an ideal marketplace it should never be possible to accrue extreme wealth as other providers should swoop in when they discover that there are profit opportunities. If the marketplace does not work like that, then regulation should ensure that we go towards an ideal marketplace.
This is, btw, why all industrialised countries have rules against monopolies.
Ie. extreme wealth inequality is a sign of a dysfunctional capitalistic system.
> Any income differential that results in a power imbalance makes the world worse.
And that might be true but I think it misses the point of the argument. Increasing the quality of life for the global poor is much more important than capping Satya's wealth. There's no equivalence here.
Eg. global minimum tax schemes are a promising category og tools to fix this. Indifferently to how you see it, that would decrease somebody's wealth, that they are being taxed on their (foreign) assets.
Increasing quality of life for the poorest people will have to require wealth (and power) redistribution – but that should happen within a framework of fair regulation and fair taxing.
Does Satya Nadella not giving all of his extra monies to better causes and instead keeping it for himself make the lives of others (those in poverty) worse? Or "not better"? aka "billionaires choose to retain some portion of their earnings/wealth instead of dedicating it to poverty"
Then the question becomes "why do we expect those with a lot of money to selflessly not want to keep the money for themselves and instead give back/give it away"