It's irrational to lay off either of those employees, and unrealistic that your low performers are all bringing more value to the company than you pay them for. More realistic is that the low performer on 200k is bringing 100k of value, and the low performer on 50k is bringing in 25k (or 0, or -25k...in either case it makes more sense to let the higher paid one go).

You might say, you've been irrational in hiring these guys at all, and certainly in paying them that much. But maybe they were making money last year and the marketplace changed - the irrational thing is that it's generally impossible to cut salaries and better to make 10% of your workforce redundant than to pay them all 10% less.

So IBM catches applicants who are making their most rational decisions based on limited information (irrational ones), and fires them when they become more rational. Government regulation attempts to compensate for that.

If anything I assume that due to the sheer amount of folks that were laid off (around 10,000), and the fact that layoffs affected every business unit, a truly effective way of executing the layoff was close to impossible.