[Frondo]

What I'd like to see is what the numbers look like if you:

1) Pegged the CEO <-> lowest-paid worker (or contracted worker, so you can't just contract out the janitors) to no greater than 10 to 1.

2) Balance out the next few layers of management to reflect that cap.

3) And see what pay looks like for the lowest-paid workers.

If you don't like 10-to-1, maybe we do 20-to-1. Find a nice low ratio, though, and if people want to make more, they can run the business such that everyone makes more.

[Kalium]

Very minimally different, I rather strongly suspect. You'd probably get larger shareholder dividends, but not that much larger.

There's this idea we're dealing with here that there's massive, virtually untapped, make-everybody-well-paid amounts of money being wasted on management overhead. It's a very reasonable idea. Managers at the top get paid an amount of money that's clearly and obviously incredibly excessive and has absolutely no connection to anything!

Yet, it might be worth considering that this might not actually be true in the important broad sense. What if there isn't a vast pool of money locked up in management salaries that would dramatically improve the lives of workers? What if there isn't the "fix the car money" or "send a kid to college money" another poster was rhapsodizing about for every worker? Might it be worth considering that in most cases, managers aren't actually paid vastly more than their direct reports?

Besides, there are plenty of ways to structure businesses that would get around something as simplistic as a compensation ratio.

There will always be another "But what if we run the numbers differently?" scenario.

[Frondo]

I have no reason to believe that it's minimally different, and I'm curious what reason you do, aside from it's comforting.

When 10 people own as much as half of the population of the country, there's something there. Calling it not "a vast pool of money" might be semantics, because there's definitely something there.

[Kalium]

When 10 people own as much as half the population, there's definitely a lot wrong with society.

It's perhaps worth considering that most companies might not replicate that structure internally. Given the numbers above, this strikes me as good reason to suspect that the approach you describe - while definitely a good idea to promote equality! - might not have the the numerical outputs you expect.