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"?
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%.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't this apply to billionaires ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
£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.
iso1631•1d ago
As it stands someone on £4.4m a year only picks up £2.4m, with £2m going to the taxman, as well as an extra £660k the employer pays.
Someone picking up £1b through share price increase will pick up £720m after tax -- it will take the FTSE boss 300 years to earn that much.
A FTSE boss with £50m in the bank will earn more from capital growth in an index fund than they will through work.