- Your argument could be rephrased as "profit-sharing isn't necessary as long as you pay people enough." This may work at mega-successful businesses like Microsoft, but doesn't work so well at something like a restaurant chain (or Amazon), where income inequality is far more pronounced. And those cases are far more common.
- Concentrations of wealth and capital have a destabilizing effect on society. It leads to political corruption. Further, even if we have a handful of companies where income inequality is relatively low, that's not the case for most Americans, even at those same companies. In other words, sure software engineers are doing fine, but most people aren't, including many people working for the same companies as those software engineers.
Overall I think it would actually be really cool if we could get to where we think we are, where I can essentially pick from a menu of career options based on a risk/reward profile (OK not literally a menu but, yeah). But we're pretty far away from that right now; very few people are making these decisions based on that kind of calculus.
The unfortunate reality is that you will never be able to pick from a menu of all possible career options because you (whoever you are) are not cut out for all possible careers. There are many people in the world who are better suited to doing job X, even if you think you'd like to do job X more.
The numbers are real bad though [1] [2] [3]. White people own 80% of small businesses, and men own 64%. In 2012 (admittedly old but, the Census site is very bad) white men owned 2,933,198 firms with employees on the payroll. Everyone else owned 356,816 firms. Those same white men's firms had sales receipts of $8,221,010,815. Other firms had $88,657,443. That's nuts. Even more so when you consider white men are only ~33% of Americans. My guess is that COVID-19 makes this even worse, but who knows really.
> The unfortunate reality is that you will never be able to pick from a menu of all possible career options because you (whoever you are) are not cut out for all possible careers. There are many people in the world who are better suited to doing job X, even if you think you'd like to do job X more.
I 100% agree but, I wouldn't say it's unfortunate. I just think people should get equal pay for equal work, and CEOs aren't 270x more valuable than average workers. Maybe it's 5x, maybe even 10x, but not 270x. And that's salary difference, we're not even factoring in lifetime earnings.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/23/the-financi...
[2]: http://www.experian.com/whitepapers/BOLStudy_Experian.pdf
[3]: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=SBOCS2012.SB1200CSA...
But white people are 73% of the US population. Obviously it'd be nice if everything was proportional, but all things considered (how recently black people got fully equal rights, for example), I think 7% over-representation is pretty damn good, not "real bad", and the trend is heading in the right direction. Seems like a gap that is very doable to close with purely "encourage everyone to start a business" policies, and egalitarian policies like those should be the preference when possible. With respect to men vs. women, I think a similar argument should be made. Women were < 30% of the workforce ~70 years ago, and still haven't even made it to 50%. Given the importance and biological realities around childbirth, I'm not sure women ever will be 50% (until we grow babies ex-vivo, that is). But as long as trends are positive, it is better not to use regulation as an attempt to overcompensate for perceived inequalities, as that can (and does) frequently backfire. Even if the number of women-led businesses is not going up, you can't just assume this is because women are actively being prevented/discouraged from doing so, you need to demonstrate that. Because an alternate explanation is that women (for whatever reason, maybe they like healthy work/life balances?) are choosing, very much of their own free will and without undue pressure from society, to not start businesses at a higher rate than men.
> Maybe it's 5x, maybe even 10x, but not 270x
This doesn't seem to be a particularly rational stance. If you don't have a good reason behind why it should be one multiple and not another, I don't think its your place to decide that multiple. This sounds a lot like the oft-repeated "nobody should be a billionaire". Um, why not? A billion dollars is an arbitrary amount of value. For example, a billion Zimbabwean dollars in 2008 wouldn't buy a coke[1]. Obviously in the case of USD right now, $1B is a lot of value. But if I make some useful piece of software (entirely on my own) that I sell to 100,000,000 people for $10 each, why should I not be a billionaire? Again, if you don't have a rational (rather than emotional) underlying argument for why X amount of value is "too much", it is not your place to decide that number.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
> 2,933,198 firms with employees on the payroll. Everyone else owned 356,816 firms. Those same white men's firms had sales receipts of $8,221,010,815. Other firms had $88,657,443. That's nuts. Even more so when you consider white men are only ~33% of Americans. My guess is that COVID-19 makes this even worse, but who knows really.
White people aren't 89% (or 99%, in the case of sales) of the population. And at numbers this big, 7% is 210,000 firms. That's not nothing.
> This doesn't seem to be a particularly rational stance. If you don't have a good reason behind why it should be one multiple and not another, I don't think its your place to decide that multiple.
CEO pay isn't meritocratic and has all kinds of ills besides [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. I think generally the argument here is something like, "well, CEOs/CTOs/etc. just provide a lot more value than your average white collar worker", but the studies don't show that. Further, data show that (again) high relative CEO pay is bad for the company and bad for society in general.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also say that while we're spending a lot of time on high incomes here, high levels of wealth are far, far worse. We need policies to reign in disproportionate salaries certainly, but we also need a wealth tax. I could cite some more stuff but, frankly the best thing to do here is read Capital by Piketty.
> This sounds a lot like the oft-repeated "nobody should be a billionaire". Um, why not?
Because people are dying from poverty; they're losing their cars and houses; their kids aren't going to college; their parents aren't getting medicine they need to stay healthy and live; etc. etc. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos could give every person in the US restaurant industry $1,000/mo for a year and still have hundreds of millions of dollars.
You might dismiss that as emotional, but I think these are exactly the reasons people have money: to provide shelter for themselves and their loved ones, to get medicine, to get education. That's not emotional stuff, that's like, what are the basic needs of humanity stuff.
[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...
[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steve_Werner2/publicati...
[3]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ceo-pay-and-performance-dont-ma...
[4]: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46078405/The_effects_o...
[5]: https://hbr.org/1990/05/ceo-incentives-its-not-how-much-you-...
From there we are on to wealth inequality. Wealth inequality has absolutely nothing to do with poverty. The wealth gap has been growing for the past 50 years while poverty has been going down – not sure how much clearer of a sign is needed. Nobody is starving as a result of Jeff Bezos owning Amazon. And can we please, for the love of god, stop pretending that wealth (especially wealth in the form of owning a significant portion of a very successful business) is liquid? Jeff Bezos absolutely cannot give all those restaurant workers $12k, as the price he would get for selling all of his Amazon shares is nowhere near his current "net worth". The problem with this argument is not that it's "emotional", it is that it is wrong. It is also an emotional appeal, and sometimes those are useful. But only when they are also correct.
[1] https://www.inc.com/amy-nelson/women-drive-majority-of-consu...
Race-conscious (and gender-conscious etc.) policies like affirmative action are effective because they directly address the systemic and institutional discrimination these groups face. If you're not a cis straight white man of a certain height and background, you aren't starting with the same advantages as those who are. Therefore, if we adopt policies that don't take those disadvantages into account--i.e. they benefit everyone equally--we don't solve anything. We simply magnify the existing inequality.
And it's important that we do solve this. White men hold a disproportionate amount of power in American society because it's easier for them to make more money, own more things, run for office, buy houses in neighborhoods where housing value increases at high rates, start businesses, invest in stocks, network with others who are able to do these things, send their kids to prestigious schools, avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods and food deserts, etc. etc.
> Rather than begrudging the success of white men, how about we encourage non-whites and/or non-men to participate in that success.
Can I ask you where it seems like I was begrudging the success of white men? I think you're reading a lot into what I'm writing. I certainly don't feel that way. I'm not saying we should tax white male owners of SBs and redistribute the wealth to others; I'm saying we should tax Jeff Bezos et al down to $50 million and remake US society.
Further, what are your ideas for encouraging minorities to participate in that success? Is it something other than adopt policies that directly benefit them?
> But nobody wins when you tear the successful people down because you are jealous of their success. It didn't work in Nazi Germany with the Jews and it didn't work in the USSR with Kulak farmers, and it's not a good idea here either.
That's a little hyperbolic. I don't find it productive when you impugn my motives as "jealousy" and compare my tax prescriptions to the holocaust.
> Wealth inequality has absolutely nothing to do with poverty. The wealth gap has been growing for the past 50 years while poverty has been going down
I think it depends on how you look at it [1], but broadly yeah, I would agree wealth inequality isn't related to poverty. But I'm saying we take money away from billionaires and give it to those in poverty. I think that would have a direct effect on their poverty status. Maybe I wasn't explicit enough about this, I don't always make all the connections clear.
> Nobody is starving as a result of Jeff Bezos owning Amazon.
Not by virtue of owning Amazon, but quite literally because he didn't spend the money to feed them, yes they are. It's also the same for you and me, FWIW, it's just that I could maybe do it for 1-2 people and he can do it for millions.
Maybe that's what we're dancing around here, maybe you're a taxation is theft person and I'm a property is theft person.
> And can we please, for the love of god, stop pretending that wealth (especially wealth in the form of owning a significant portion of a very successful business) is liquid?
It actually seems like it's pretty easy for him to do this [2], and his ex-wife is proving it also [3]. Selling stock is pretty easy. I don't super care about the exact numbers, and I would prefer a better policy framework that prevented him from amassing so much wealth in the first place. But again I think that's profit sharing, taxing inordinately high comp, worker membership on corporate boards, etc.
[1]: https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/154286/50YearTrends.pd...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2020/08/05/jeff-be...
[3]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/tech/mackenzie-scott-bezos-do...