[simplecomplex]

Everyone is free to be a CEO. If salaries are really too high it should be easy to get a CEO position by undercutting everyone else.

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and complain other people are making too much money. Remember that CEOs making less wont result in employees making more.

Maybe it’s just me, but HN lately seems dominated by whiny/complaining articles that don’t really contribute any knowledge or enhance our lives.

Wouldn’t it be better to focus on how one could become a CEO rather than knee jerk reactions to people making lots of money?

[cronix]

People are also free to vote for people like Ocasio-Cortez, who are more than willing to take it from the top as it continues to spiral out of whack. You can only displace the bottom for so long, until they get fed up enough and vote for radical change, or worse. That's probably not what most want, myself included, but here we are going from 20:1 in the 70's to 300:1. How far do you think that can reasonably keep tilting until people force a correction? There is a tipping point, and it's not infinite.

It's not a knee jerk reaction to people making a lot of money. It's an honest reaction to watching the people at the top continue to grow and grow and grow over the last 40 years while the rest are basically paid the same (adjusted for inflation) as they were making 20 years ago.

It's not me you need to convince. It's the tens of millions of people who are barely making it, watching others get tax breaks while they truly struggle with the basics of life. We're not at a reasonable balance any longer, and haven't been. We can continue the status quo, and change will eventually be forced. Something reasonable needs to give here, and the answer isn't everybody becoming a CEO.

[coredog64]

> but here we are going from 20:1 in the 70's to 300:1

It's worth mentioning that the 20:1 from the 70s only covers cash compensation. In the "good old days", execs would also get non-cash compensation: Expense accounts, company cars, executive apartments, country club memberships, etc.

Tax law changes disadvantaged those forms of compensation and are partially responsible for some of that difference.

[Mirioron]

>People are also free to vote for people like Ocasio-Cortez

She got elected because of the primary. She isn't exactly a vote magnet.

>That's probably not what most want, myself included, but here we are going from 20:1 in the 70's to 300:1.

You are fed a narrative. There are people actively working against capitalism that will try to craft a narrative at every turn. Think critically about what you just said:

CEO-to-worker pay ratio has gone from 20:1 to 300:1 in top firms in the US. That last part is very important. The evaluation of those companies has increased as has the average number of employees. The CEO of Walmart needs much better skills compared to the CEO of a corner store. Walmart has over 2 million employees nowadays and they have a revenue of $500 billion. On the other hand, the skills and responsibility required from a clerk at Walmart are similar to the responsibilities and skills of a clerk at the corner store.

>Something reasonable needs to give here,

People need to stop buying into a narrative.

>and the answer isn't everybody becoming a CEO.

The reason he brought up everybody becoming a CEO is because the job of a CEO of these top companies is very difficult. You need very skilled people that are also very positive towards the company, because even the smallest mistakes by them can make the company suffer a lot of losses.

[Jare]

> Remember that CEOs making less wont result in employees making more

As long as employees making less (and being made to mean less) mean CEOs making more, you are right. But it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't, but it requires realigning incentives among many other things.

[hnbroseph]

> Everyone is free to be a CEO.

this is such a thoroughly trivial and simplistic observation, that it contains basically zero useful information.

[Mirioron]

He's saying that everybody can run their own business. If it's so easy as people try to make it out to be, then why doesn't everybody do it? The answer is that it is too difficult. He's trying to make people realize why these top CEOs are paid so much.

[hnbroseph]

given how poor the correlation is between ceo pay and performance, this isn't clear.