[DwnVoteHoneyPot]

Unpopular opinion, but I don't care what a CEO makes. It feels like jealousy and envy driving people to care what other people make. An analogy is going onto social media and trying to compare myself to them.

I do want to be paid fairly for my work so the transparency of same job is useful, but a CEO is so far removed from me. I don't compare myself to a major league baseball player either.

Can someone enlighten me to why I should be outraged at this "inequality"?

[jjav]

Wealth, at the top end of the scale, is not money, it is power.

Between two people who make 100K vs 1M a year, there is a lot of difference in purchasing power, but there is basically little-to-none difference in power. They're still working class people, neither of them can buy favorable laws or supreme court judgments.

But when you concentrate most wealth into a few people, those people have inordinate power to influence government, legislation, laws and courts. They get whatever they want, which of course is even more concentration of power in their hands.

You can't have a functional democracy when a handful of people are far more equal than most of the population.

[yesfitz]

This reminds me of "Mag Wealth"[1] from Mag World.

I wonder if there's any effective way to peacefully prevent that concentration in the long run, or if it's something that requires constant vigilance.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45938427

[leosanchez]

> those people have inordinate power to influence government

Relatives of the President / Prime Minister also have influence on the government.

[bigbadfeline]

> Relatives of the President / Prime Minister also have influence on the government.

Not necessarily, in a properly working system it wouldn't happen. When it does happen, it's a sign that the elected official isn't up to par, which in turn, is a sign that the pool of candidates wasn't either. And guess who exerts the most influence on selecting the candidates and electing the leaders - it's not their relatives.

Follow the money, first and foremost - any deviation from that leads to errors and waste of time.

[leosanchez]

> Not necessarily, in a properly working system it wouldn't happen.

Why wouldn't this apply to billionaires ?

[triceratops]

Because nobody votes for billionaires. They don't have to follow ethics standards like elected officials do. They are free to make decisions that selectively benefit their family or friends (as long as they don't screw over their own shareholders).

[estearum]

A practical concern is that capitalism (at its most ideal) is a mechanism to signal what people want/need, and as more capital accrues to fewer and fewer people, they become the only people whose wants/needs are important for the market to satisfy, which then breaks the central desirable trait of capitalism.

We should want enough variation in incomes to produce incentive for outsized value creation, but not so much that the market has relatively zero incentive to meet the needs of anyone who's not in the 1%.

[iso1631]

A CEO is probably more relatable to the guy who cleans his office than the guy who owns the company.

£4.4m/yr PAYE will grow your wealth per year the same as much as having £30m in a reinvesting fund.

If you had £30m you'd be well off, but it's not exactly earth shattering. You get people who can pull £30m a day our of their funds and still see them grow exponentially.

[_fw]

Because CEOs are largely paid at the expense of people like you.

Does a C-level executive deliver £20m of value, or do they extract it?

Landlords and rent seekers get rich from what they own, not what they create. C-levels rewarded in shares for short-term gains are no different.

Tell me, does that single individual earning so much represent better or worse value for an organisation than you do?

What’s their ROI multiplier?

It’s fine if it’s higher. If it’s not higher, it’s corporate greed and feudal fat-cattery.

[0xy]

>paid at the expense of people like you

If you paid a CEO £500k instead of £20m and divided the rest amongst the average number of employees amongst the FTSE100 which is 44,000, then each of those workers could enjoy a £38 pay rise monthly pre-tax.

>What’s their ROI multiplier?

Without the CEO, the company would not exist, not function or certainly not be as large as it is. So their contribution to the company provides for 44,000 people directly, and probably another 250,000 or more indirectly through family, downstream economic impacts etc.

It's pretty clear to say that, say, a shelf-stocker at Tesco, while improving revenue at a single location by perhaps tens of thousands of dollars, doesn't even come close to providing that level of economic opportunity. If that same person was removed from their position and not replaced, the impact to that store, to Tesco and to the community, would be less than negligible. It would not even be possible to be measure.

That doesn't mean it isn't noble to be shelf-stocker, a janitor, or even a software engineer. It is. But that doesn't mean you get to pretend you're feeding 294,000 people.

[triceratops]

> If you paid a CEO £500k instead of £20m and divided the rest amongst the average number of employees amongst the FTSE100 which is 44,000, then each of those workers could enjoy a £38 pay rise monthly pre-tax.

What if you cut the entire C-suite's salaries? And maybe their reports' salaries too?

> Without the CEO, the company would not exist, not function or certainly not be as large as it is

You mean the founder. Otherwise the company existed before the CEO came along. And if it didn't employ that CEO it would employ some other CEO.