If you think you are truly worth that money, then build your own business.
AAGMF has becoming a massive juggernaut taking in insane amount of talent and sometimes directing them towards mundane causes.
Quitting is always an option.
I always said that until the 2003 downturn. Things can change very quickly.
It is certainly why they are getting screwed though. People should aggressively save, so they are treated properly.
People also sometimes willingly make themselves exploitable, through their own fault, by adding tons of debt and liabilities (children, houses, vehicles) into the equation. One would be a fool to think people aren't looking at those to assess your risk tolerance
Considering that's kinda what you're arguing for when you say that they should just quit, yes, I would consider it relevant.
"People also sometimes willingly make themselves exploitable, through their own fault, by adding tons of debt and liabilities (children, houses, vehicles) into the equation. One would be a fool to think people aren't looking at those to assess your risk tolerance"
No. The fault for exploitation is ALWAYS entirely on those doing the exploiting. Always. They are the ones actively choosing to fuck people over.
Can you give an alternative reason on why average wages should increase?
>The Economic Policy Institute’s earlier paper, Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge, presented a thorough analysis of income and wage trends, documented rising wage inequality, and provided strong evidence that wage stagnation is largely the result of policy choices that boosted the bargaining power of those with the most wealth and power (Bivens et al. 2014). As we argued, better policy choices, made with low- and moderate-wage earners in mind, can lead to more widespread wage growth and strengthen and expand the middle class.
https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
>Finally, it also seems worth noting that this decoupling coincided with the passage of many policies that explicitly aimed to erode the bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers in the labor market.
I am in my 20's I was not alive in the 70's. What did Nixon, Ford, and Carter change in that time that eroded the bargaining power of wage workers?
- The Powell Memo in 1971 [0]
- Rise of corporate raiding ~1980 [1]
- CPI inflection in 1970s [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Mem...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raid
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index#/media/Fi...
dv_dt and existencebox hit it well - cultural more than technical. But, the cultural changes impacted policy. I've posted the following article in the past, but it provides a clear image of the issue - from one of the people who set the wheels in motion.
>But there is a theme that threads through and ties together all the strands: many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
>By continuing to get better at what they do, by knocking away the guardrails limiting their winnings, aggressively engineering changes in the political landscape, and by dint of the often unanticipated consequences of their innovations, they created a nation of moats that protected them from accountability and from the damage their triumphs caused in the larger community. Most of the time, our elected and appointed representatives were no match for these overachievers. As a result of their savvy, their drive and their resources (and a certain degree of privilege, as these strivers may have come from humble circumstances but are mostly white men), America all but abandoned its most ambitious and proudest ideal: the never perfect, always debated and perpetually sought after balance between the energizing inequality of achievement in a competitive economy and the community-binding equality promised by democracy. In a battle that began a half-century ago, the achievers won.
http://time.com/5280446/baby-boomer-generation-america-steve...
There was also a generational shift from business leaders who had been alive to feel the effects of the depression as well as when the rich weren't so insulated from the poor, to those where born well after those effects firsthand.
1) Increasing inequality of social power between the mega rich and the common person
2) A feeling of unfairness as business leaders take home the lions share of profits
#1 is a true issue, but, let's be honest here, the average CEO's level pay isn't contributing to increasing inequality. That McDonald's CEO had a yearly take home pay of 21.7m. That's unbelievable peanuts compared to the wealth of the mega-rich. It is the multi-billionaires flexing their political muscles and exerting influence that leads to the nasty consequences of pay inequality.
As to #2, I understand the unfairness, but fail to understand the social consequences of it. In other words - what harm to society is being done by a manager getting paid more than a line employee? You mentioned offshoring jobs, but that is a separate issue, not tied to pay inequality.
The social consequences of unfairness are huge. Once people feel they work in an unfair society they become cynical and lose motivation. I would argue a sense of fairness is the number one ingredient for a successful society.
Until ironically, the wealthy simply leave (because who wants to stay in an a dangerous unstable place, when you can afford to leave), and let place that they set on fire burn to the ground, click their tongues and say, "Who knew this would happen?"
To think of it another way, no one puts all bets on a single investment. You diversify. That's what spreading the wealth does. It diversifies opportunity.
One think to think about, in a lot of areas where only luxury condos are being built, there tend to be pretty limited numbers of condos being built. If you are a developer and you know you will only be allowed to build 50 units, you are going to build the most expensive units you can so you can maximize your gross profit even if the marginal profit rate isn't as good. If you were allowed to build 1000 units, you might choose to build affordable housing that has a better marginal profit since the larger number of units allows you to have a higher gross profit.
At the same time, if you own an lot full of RVs and mobile mobile homes in a rich suburb, you might end up running the numbers and deciding to throw all those people out, and put up some luxury condos, because you can make a lot more money per square foot.
There was a movie while ago where the rich people lived in space in beautiful habitats, had technology that could heal anybody while the rest had to labor on Earth under terrible conditions. Don't remember the name but maybe the move isn't that fictitious.
https://globalperipheries.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/the-favel...
But a version of this is present in America too. With areas without drinkable water, and areas w/o even a working sanitation system.
Elysium is the film.
Of course, he could just copy Petey Thiel and the rest of wretch and move to New Zealand.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/29/silicon-v...
Since you're being downvoted without any responses, I'll try to add my take. To me, it's not that a manager is getting paid more. It's that he's getting paid 312x more when the average worker in America struggling to afford healthcare, an education for their kids, and probably has to take in two salaries just to make ends meet. That's when income inequality is a problem -- when it's so unequal that one side gets everything, and the other is left to a battle royale.
This assumption comes from evidence in our not-so-distant past. In the 1940s-60s, income was taxed at a much higher rate in the higher brackets (50-80%+ depending on the time); this served a similar function of the executive pay cap in your hypothetical. After the highest earners in a company reached the top brackets, it didn't make much sense for the company to further increase their pay (much of it would be lost to taxes so the ROI wasn't great).
So now you have all this leftover profit that, in 2018, would have went to CEO pay or bonuses. What is there to do with it? Invest in the company of course: give the best performing line-level employees raises, start internal training programs, kickstart moonshot R&D ideas, and so on.
(Unions also helped in ensuring that the rank and file got pay increases commensurate with management's raises)
Don't get me wrong, the highest earners were still very wealthy (and had plenty of yachts/summer homes/other symbols we associate with the 0.1%) and it was common to give them raises every year, but the higher marginal rates really did help in "forcing" profits downward.
"We took all the increased profits, so there's none left for you."
We're seeing increasing profits, increasing wages for high level management, and static wages for most employees.
The second isn't an intrinsic issue itself, but we don't have just the second, we have all three, and _that_ is the problem. If profits and wages were both stagnant, then we would be having a different problem, but that isn't the world we live in. We live in the world where profits are going up, and all of it is going to people other than the workers.
Yeah, it does. Money given to bosses and shareholders is money not available to pay workers.
To be clear, my issue is not that workers shouldn't be paid more, it is that justification for higher worker pay shouldn't be "my boss gets paid more than me."
Edit: I should be a bit more specific. I think in some stages of development, it has and still is succeeding very well (developing nations). In other areas like developed nations, there is a regression to inequality that is occurring that is figuratively and literally headed to destabilizing the world.
That's the worst part of it. Companies are split up in two sections. One that benefits from the company's success while others get almost nothing. I see that in my company. In meetings they celebrate increased revenue and earnings. When I look around almost nobody except a few top guys I see benefits from that success and instead has to wonder when his job goes to India.
There was a discussion here about increasing employee participation. I really think we should get away from the belief that only shareholders count but also acknowledge that employees and even the communities where the company has its buildings have a stake.