|
|
|
|
|
|
by thelonecabbage
5238 days ago
|
|
|
They also wore more hats. Or the market was different, or they weren't dealing with labor shortages, or their predecessors set the stage differently, or inflation has increased 580% since 1970.... It's not possible to tease out the cause and effect. Fortunately there is an easier way to figure it out; if the businesses are hiring idiots, at far to much money the easy way to tell they are doing it is their stock price will plummet and they will go out of business. |
|
|
A really significant difference that I rarely see acknowledged in these discussions is that the means of compensation has changed drastically in the last few decades.
It used to be that executives got part of their compensation through perks like generous expense accounts, or country club memberships, or keys to the executive washroom. Changes in tax laws and other cultural norms have eliminated these as such. But the corporations still need to be able to compete for the same pool of executives, and so the money that had been going into those perks now surfaces as monetary compensation.
In other words, much of the apparent increase in salaries is actually just that part of the old-days compensation wasn't reflected as income.