Abigail Disney finds Bob Iger's pay absurd

Reduce the CEO's pay to $1 million. Employee pay won't increase (because that isn't how comp systems work). Is it now moral? Employees are in the same situation as they are today. But is it moral because the multiple of exec pay to median (or average or mean or whatever benchmark you want to use) is lower?

why focus only on a CEO's pay? Why not regulate the spread between lowest paid worker and highest paid worker?

urumqi said:

bigboy, I don't believe so because I don't read "how valuable whatever you do is to whomever you do it for" so narrowly.

Well, you should because it's exactly how I meant it.

Whatever someone determines whatever you do is worth is all it's worth. If you want more, find someone that values it more or do something that's more valuable to someone.

With that logic no one ever makes too much or too little...ever.

A CEO can make 1400 times what a broompusher makes and it all makes perfect sense.

If you want to make what the CEO makes, find someone that values broompushing at that level or obtain the skills it takes to be the CEO of a company.

If you're coming from the other side and trying to say someone doesn't deserve what they make - then that's just fallacy. They deserve it based on the fact that someone feels what they do it worth that amount and is willing to pay it.

Ok. Now that I better understand what Lord Gonchar meant, I no longer agree with him.

urumqi said:

why focus only on a CEO's pay? Why not regulate the spread between lowest paid worker and highest paid worker?

Because the CEO typically is the highest paid.

I also believe that our "market" (economic system) is irrational as it relies heavily on psychological manipulation (advertising, marketing, propaganda etc.) to create value and, therefore, it's imperative that we counteract our propensity for delusion with rational checks and balances.

Jeff said:

Because the CEO typically is the highest paid.

Correct, and, therefore, only represents one side of the "spread."

No, it doesn't. The spread has no cap. That's why you can't make a logical argument. The scale starts at $1 and has no cap. So if you find CEO pay to be immoral (ignoring what the market will bear), then who gets to decide how much is too much?

Above i wrote that instead of simply thinking of “income regulation” as capping top wage earners, I said another mechanism would be to regulate the difference (spread) between the highest wage earner and the lowest wage earner. That’s tautologically true.

And, you keep wanting to argue that I believe "CEO pay to be immoral." It's becoming frustrating and I hope you can resist trying to make the reference going forward. Although this is now the second time I felt compelled to write this in the last two hours: I do not believe CEO pay is immoral, I have not written that I believe it is immoral, and I have not inferred that "CEO pay is immoral."

it's imperative that we counteract our propensity for delusion with rational checks and balances

Who will act as the so-called "rational check and balance.?"

urumqi said:

In regard to her moral argument (that the lowest paid employees are paid so poorly that they are dehumanized) I tend to agree generally (I have no knowledge about Disney's lowest paid employees). We (the US) have created mythologies around the importance of CEO's and Executives that have created generations of people believing that the "value" of these people is exponentially greater than the value of those doing "less important" jobs. And, I think these mythologies and the resulting moral paradigms have enabled us to create a culture in which there is tremendous economic inequality.

I'm sorry, but this seems dangerously close to stating that CEO pay is immoral. If she is making an argument against CEO pay as a moral issue, and you agree with this argument, how is that not saying that CEO pay is immoral.

I want to understand your point, even though I disagree with it.

urumqi said:

I do not believe CEO pay is immoral, I have not written that I believe it is immoral, and I have not inferred that "CEO pay is immoral."

Yeah, but you've certainly implied that the inequality between the high and low ends is immoral.

And then you wrote this:

I tend to believe that we either go all in and create real fiduciary punishments (imprisonment, public lashings etc.) for executives, CEOs. doctors etc. to correspond with the benefits they've been granted...and admit that everyone ****s in the same toilets. that the value of a CEO is not 1000s greater than the value of someone cleaning his toilet, and regulate salaries to correspond to this existential reality.

So what are you saying?

Looks to me like you're saying CEOs (and other high paid professions) are overvalued and should be punished accordingly.

You're saying other people in the world make more than you're comfortable with and you'd like to punish them.

That's a moral judgement whether you word it like one or not.

urumqi said:

Above i wrote that instead of simply thinking of “income regulation” as capping top wage earners, I said another mechanism would be to regulate the difference (spread) between the highest wage earner and the lowest wage earner. That’s tautologically true.

That's literally the same mechanism when the scale starts at $1. If you're implying that someone selling churros should simply make more, it's the same problem... who decides what the minimum is? The market deciding is the only thing that isn't arbitrary.

If you don't think that CEO pay is immoral, then what exactly is it that you're passionate about? You said you agree with Abigail Disney, who is in fact saying in plain terms that the CEO pay is immoral.

I don't know, that's an interesting question. Who or what would you like to act as the "rational check and balance" to the ever increasing disparity between the country's top wage earners and the lowest wage earners? Should it be an organization similar to the FDA? Should it be legislation similar to ERISA? Should it be a constitutional amendment similar to the commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution? Should it be through the IRS with a taxing mechanism? As an example of what it might look like, the country and states have long adopted and amended anti-trust laws to keep corporations in check that have largely helped eliminate adverse consequences of monopolies. Although it's arguably been gutted over the last thirty years, we have the National Labor Relations Act which has done a reasonable job separating the classic "triumvirate of power" (at least labor and capital."

Is there a reason the wage gap needs to be smaller, beyond the myth that "there's only so much money to go around"?

Jeff, I'm beginning to believe that you're more interested in "proving me wrong" than you are in reading what I write. For you continually misconstrue what I've written. If you want to re-read what I agreed with about Abigail Disney's sentiments you can look above. I pulled the exact quotes from the article with which i agreed. In summary (1) the spread between top wage earners and the lowest wage earner is immoral; and (2) we have dehumanized many people because of irrationally overvaluing high-wage earner while devaluing others.

I'm not misconstruing anything... three of us now have pointed out that you're saying one thing, but insisting that it's not what you're saying. I don't think the misunderstanding is us. But if you're going to summarize with bullet points...

1. Why is the spread immoral? You haven't given us a reason, but you're unwilling to respond to everyone else's suggestion that a difference in skill is indicative of a difference in compensation.
2. Literally no one is dehumanizing "many people" for either how little they make or how much someone else makes. No one disputes that you, me, Bob, all crap the same way. If you believe that someone who makes less money is worth less as a human being, that's a decision that you're making, not everyone else.

Jeff said:

1. No one disputes that you, me, Bob, all crap the same way.

Actually, I would like to dispute this.

I like to believe Bob craps like this...

...and that makes him worth well over 1000 times what most of us normal crappers are.

Vater, this is not necessarily my belief but to give you an example of how some people might answer your question, the Heritage Foundation has this written on its website:

"Mutual obligation pervades the American social contract. Mutual responsibility is its central moral and social value, and continued respect for that value is essential if the huge financial commitments between the generations are to be managed in a prudent and secure manner.

As we look well into the future, we must surely be worried that the intergenerational social contract of today is structurally unsound and morally challenged. The social insurance programs we have constructed now threaten to weaken the economic security of our children and grandchildren rather than strengthen it. And increasingly they conflict with basic notions of social justice. We need structural reforms of those programs to revive our vision of the social contract."

If you were to accept that, you might agree that redistributing the wealth in the country would provide greater intergenerational security and enforce the American social contract, for example.