[munk-a]

My point is that hiring someone more effective for that position may increase revenues but there is nothing inherent in that effective person that is yielding an additional 50$ million in profits that a normal person couldn't come out with a yield of 40 or 45 million.

This is a conflation between an important position (being able to resolve disputes and push decisions and direction) and being an important person. CEOs have skills, and have invested heavily in training those skills (if they aren't terrible) but those skills are not skills unattainable to the normal person, society just doesn't need very many people with those skills and the apparent value those skills create via business decisions appear to pay off handsomely. But that $50 million the exec's decision has made for the company isn't solely due to their work, if the company didn't have programmers and labourers and marketing and manufacturing to support the decision and deliver on the decision then that $50 million wouldn't have been earned.

Their decision is important, but their involvement isn't worth the full value the company receives based on making that decision, because without the supporting labour their decision may have been genius, but it would have netted no profit to the company. I think this sort of highlights what I consider to be a real issue with how we evaluate personal value in the modern world and why assets are becoming so concentrated in the hands of so few.

[ryandrake]

> CEOs have skills, and have invested heavily in training those skills (if they aren't terrible) but those skills are not skills unattainable to the normal person

This is an understatement. I'd wager that the average fresh graduate of a decent two-year MBA program has all the raw knowledge and business skills required to be the CEO of 90% of companies out there. What they do is not rocket science. The reason all of us are not CEOs is not that it's impossibly challenging or specialized, it's simply that there is only one per company and there are more people than companies. It's a small tent and not everyone can fit under it.

I've met senior executives who I considered brilliant and wise beyond belief, and I've met senior executives who I'm surprised could even tie their own shoes or back out of their driveway without running over their mailbox. There's no correlation with pay or prestige. They're all rich and beyond the point where career failure is possible, purely due to the rung of the ladder they happened to land on.

[smallgovt]

> Their decision is important, but their involvement isn't worth the full value the company receives based on making that decision

CEO's don't get anywhere near the full value the company receives based on the decisions they make.

The average S&P 500 corporation is worth $45B and grows earnings by 10% each year. The average S&P CEO gets paid $13.5 million dollars.

[jlawson]

The fundamental wrong assumption at the heart of your approach here is: The idea that people "should" be paid according to some measure of their moral worth or moral deservingness.

But when people meet to voluntarily make economic exchanges, they don't look at each others' moral deservingness; they look at where they can benefit economically.