Not that CEOs aren't being paid too much, but it won't make much difference to lower their pay.
It most certainly is enough to make a major lifestyle improvement when someone is living paycheck to paycheck. That could be the difference between just barely scraping by to being able to comfortably buy necessities and maybe even grow a savings.
This is not what the recent universal basic income study showed.
If you're talking about the OpenResearch study that Sam Altman is funding then yes it did [1]. Granted this study was a little bit more money but the results imply that any amount of extra money helps people living paycheck to paycheck in terms of financial flexibility and safety.
[1] https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/nber-working-paper-...
They just inhabit totally different financial landscapes.
I disagree. There are multiple benefits of reallocating CEO pay beyond increasing worker pay. The obvious one is morale. I work for a billionaire. I have no incentive to go above the minimum, because I know he is the only one meaningfully collecting from my labor. If my pay included a larger bonus and stock grant portion, at least there would be some connection between my work and my reward. Instead, I've had the opposite trend in my career, with the percentage of my income delivered as base salary increasing but contingent income decreasing, especially as a relative proportion when compared to my C-suite.
Two, I'd argue, it's a negative for society as a whole to create a class of ultra-rich. I'd rather see my CEO's excess compensation set on fire and delivered to no one rather than enrich him further. Class inequality will continue to be a problem even if average worker pay increases. We need to increase worker pay, but we also need to end class inequality, even if the latter does not deliver on the former.
Isn't this just crab-bucket attitude? It's one thing to argue "profits should be redistributed more fairly". It's a whole different thing to argue "excess compensation set on fire".
"you'd be able to give every worker a $30,000 bonus, every year"