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Comment by IanDrake | Hacker News Reader

>and corporate executives

Sure why not, all they did is take money from willing people called customers. While we're at it let's add...

Basketball, baseball, football, hockey, and soccer players, golfers, Hollywood stars, and successful book authors like Steven King.

These people are so greedy because they make millions a year! All while their viewers/readers/hot dog venders/editors make so much less. It's not fair.

Seriously, I don't understand why people complain about executive pay when the folks I just listed make more for adding less value to the world.

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The people who do/did the actual work to get those customers aren't the corporate executives, though: they're the engineers, janitors, sales team, etc. The executives in corporations are generally there because they have connections and/or a generational history of networking to serve as a very high ground from which to "bootstrap" or raise themselves. Not all; in fact some very wealthy owners and executives came from humble, next-to-nothing backgrounds (e.g. Whatsapp); but most--enough to make the generalization not fallacious.

There's absolutely no empirically or rationally supportable argument that executives in general ought to earn even 50 times the lowest-paid employee's wage, much less the 100s of times they currently are. This isn't to say there are no arguments for such a condition, or that there are no specific cases where empirically or rationally supportable arguments exist.

Whether and how others might complain about sports or celebrity personalities is entirely irrelevant to that issue.

A statistical model can't justify high salaries for executives, so it's not rational...so what?

The market has decided what an executive is worth and that's good enough for me. There is no better system. Markets can act irrational because it is the result of human behavior, which is often irrational.

Take all the irrationality out of humans and nothing of great achievement happens. No Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, no Bugatti Veyron, no guys in squirrel suits flying down mountains....

Thanks, but I'll keep my free market with the penalty that some irrationality makes a few people here and there a little more wealthy than they deserve.

Lots of executives around the world make huge profits for their companies and employees, without collecting multimillion dollar salaries for themselves. Since being a millionaire is empirically not required for CEOs, their multimillion dollar salaries could be better used elsewhere.

If you see a company paying their executive too much, why not either:

    a) Offer to do their job for less.
    b) Start a competing company? With your lower costs you should have no trouble crushing them in the market.

Because people who're in a position to control company buying are falling over themselves to ensure justice in wages and make sure that people who're in a position to control company buying aren't being overpaid?

You're suggesting that most shareholders are more interested in perpetuating social injustice than they are in maximizing profits?

Because people NEVER complain about sports stars/actors/authors imbalance in compensation.

But why are we talking about this when there are kids starving in Africa

/sarcasm

Not everyone has to list everything that annoys them when they are talking about one of those things.

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