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by yummyfajitas 3378 days ago
I doubt any one but you thought I meant that CEOs make more money than 300x ALL their workers, but er, thanks for the clarification anyway.

You are completely misinterpreting me. I was not arguing against this claim at all.

The statistic you cite claims that a select set of CEOs make more than the average worker across all firms. I.e., the CEO of Goldman makes 300x more than the average worker at Goldman and Walmart combined.

It does not make any claims about inequality within forms - i.e., whether the CEO of Goldman makes 300x the average worker at Goldman.

1 comments

You are correct, thank you for the clarification.

I remain convinced that CEOs of Google and Goldman make hundreds of times more money than their average workers, and that if you're going to publish an article that makes such a large claim as this one, based almost entirely on average pay data, then that should be taken into account.

Did you know the CEO of Goldman made 54 million dollars in 2007? I don't know if you remember, but the next year there was a significant economic crash that caused immense hardship for a large portion of the world, and a huge amount of the blame for it was laid at Goldman's door. HBR had fuck all to say about that, or the massive global austerity protests. A few protesters yell at Google employees getting on the bus, and they're all over it drawing wild conclusions.

I point that out because it's ironic that you'd use Goldman to make that point, considering the effect they've had on inequality.

Let's be real - blaming the amount Google pays its employees for the extreme inequality in America is fucking absurd. It's misdirection, and apparently it works to an extent even on literate, mathematically educated populations, such as this one. This is deeply concerning to me.