It doesn't seem like a crazy idea for a corporate retreat-style event. Have a day full of internal presentations reviewing the last year, describing future initiatives, etc. After dinner, Yellen talks, telling some stories about her time on the Fed, working with Clinton, and maybe caps it off with a section about "Future Challenges." People like hearing/meeting celebrities, so it caps the day off nicely while being reasonably educational too.
People spent the energy to provide sources. Are you spending the same time?
What sources provides you the confidence to say that some demographics are "overwhelmingly dominated"...?
And that's exactly the bias I'm trying to eliminate with my question.
I am struggling to think that there are any examples that you won't dismiss, no matter how applicable.
Dan Schulman, Dara Khosrowshahi, Dr. Helmut Panke. And now I'm bored of scrolling through.
There is another bin that is "paid for brand-building advertisement." - i.e. celebrities.
The proposition is that ex-government officials are just getting paid market rate for her knowledge and insight.
If that's the case, it should be trivially easy to find non government officials people getting paid $300k a speech for their knowledge.
You've identified listings - which is better than I thought there would be ! - but not sales.
Yellen earned $7.2m in two years. If all three of those combined earned half as much in speaking fees over that same time, I'd be definitely convinced that it's ho-hum
If you're a motivated research reading this interested in answering this empirically, I'd suggest trying to find organizations that both pay this level of fees and have to disclose it to the public when they do (I'm hoping this might be the case for public companies under SEC regs, but that's just a hope)
I'm not inviting Alec Baldwin for his knowledge / advice.
Are you saying Yellen is not being paid for her knowledge / advice?