Now I need to find my source ...., and I'm starting a 3 day stretch of 12 hour days at work. Give me some time and I'll try to find it .., read it this week somewhere.
Now I need to find my source ...., and I'm starting a 3 day stretch of 12 hour days at work. Give me some time and I'll try to find it .., read it this week somewhere.
Whether a CEO makes 100 or 300 or 500 times the income of the lowest level corporate fodder seems irrelevant to me (although shareholders might have something to say about it). Tearing down the rich won't raise up the poor to any appreciable degree.
Paul Ryan has talked in the past about creating a simple, unqualified guaranteed minimum income for all Americans as an alternative to the existing system of entitlements. The argument against it on the right has been that it might create a permanent dependent class. The argument against it on the left has been that it would eliminate the power of more specialized programs to influence behaviors or to target specific groups.
The number is actually 373x and refers to s&p 500 companies.
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/18/why-c...ng-higher.html
I think the reason that this number is so often brought up is because CEO pay for this group of people has gone up 937% since 1978, more than double the rate of the stock market while salaries of regular people have not.
http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-p...inues-to-rise/
The question becomes why have all the gains in productivity over the past several decades gone to the CEOs and not to the people who actually do the more work more efficiently.
If you really think that the efficiency of employees is the sole reason for better productivity, I can't convince you otherwise.Originally Posted by jp1
But perhaps you would consider that other reasons might support better productivity, such as
* managers (including the CEO) devising strategies for better efficiency, hence they are earning some of their keep
* automation is a huge, and likely the biggest, factor in better productivity
those are two I can think of off the top of my head. There are others
That's what I thought, the number is based upon approximately 350 CEO's of the largest corporations. I think a larger sample wouldn't generate the desired outrage.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
Definitely I don't think that employees working more efficiently is the sole driver, or even a major driver, of the gains in productivity. But if amazon implements a warehouse computerization system that enables the pickers to be able to pack more boxes per hour is it really reasonable to expect all of those gains to go up to the ceo or senior management rather than be shared with the staff who are actually doing the work? The best ceo in the world is worthless without a staff of people actually doing work. Eventually that will probably change as automation continues to improve and eliminate more and more jobs actually physically doing stuff. But at some point we will run into a differnt problem. Even the best ceo of an automated operation is worthless if more and more people are not able to find paying work that enables them to buy 'stuff'.If you really think that the efficiency of employees is the sole reason for better productivity, I can't convince you otherwise.
But perhaps you would consider that other reasons might support better productivity, such as
* managers (including the CEO) devising strategies for better efficiency, hence they are earning some of their keep
* automation is a huge, and likely the biggest, factor in better productivity
those are two I can think of off the top of my head. There are others
No, but there are 27M people who work for fortune 500 companies. Certainly a significant chunk of the economy so it seems reasonable to be concerned about this particular issue for this particular set of people. It would be interesting to see how much smaller a company has to get before ceo pay stops being astronomically higher than the average worker of that company and then try to figure out what's different between the companies above that size break and below it. Maybe it really is just a matter of large companies benefiting from economy of scale, but perhaps other things are at play, such as super-jumbo companies having the ability to operate internationally as a means of reducing their tax burden by shuffling income to lower tax countries. I was listening to a podcast recently, Planet Money I believe, where they were talking about how for a while when one bought equipment from Caterpillar the sale was actually from a Caterpillar subsidiary incorporated in some random country like Sweden, because the Swedish tax laws was significantly more beneficial. If I recall correctly they ended up getting in trouble for this because they didn't actually even have any employees in that country. Or how Apple ships your new iPhone directly from the factory in China rather than shipping them in bulk to the US and then sending them out to you from here to save on taxes.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective, as an example, how might employment and compensation be affected in the United States if we didn't have the highest business income tax rates in the world, thereby creating the scenario's you mentioned?
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
I suppose then even CEOs of smaller companies could have 373x the earnings of their average worker!
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