The problem is who gets to define what is "fair"?

I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that…

1 - https://hoopshype.com/player/stephen-curry/salary/

Probably the crab at the bottom of the bucket?

Limits on compensation are ineffective at achieving their goals under the best of circumstances, and the inevitable "unintended" consequences of further government manipulation in the market place would likely have negative effects.

Crab from the bottom of the bucket here: that's a lot of syllables for ???

Did I say the feds should set the limit? Why can't a respectable board set respectable limits? Cause they don't give a fuck about anything except the stock price EVEN if it means that others suffer in their wake.

That's why. That's the side you're on. Miss me with that libertarian Thiel bullshit.

We set the context in which these forms can operate though. We can decide that forms who pay >10m in comp to individuals are by definition not contributing to social well-being… they must be exploiting some assymetry, rent seeking etc. We don’t have to work out how and why in each case… just that in balance that is almost always the case and so we make that behaviour economically unviable through taxation.

Except that you rested your laurels on the last word: taxation.

Taxation is not and will never be in a place that serves the commonwealth, rather it will always align with those closer to power.

Have you not been paying attention?

In the US this may be true. It’s certainly not in Europe. 80%+ of tax take is spent on health and social benefits here which are broadly approved of by the population…

Nobody gets to decide.

I think we, collectively, as humans well define some vague idea as to what's acceptable and what's not, because no matter how smart you are, the realities that humans in motion provide are a couple more orders of magnitude more complex than your SPA repo. And it should be.

> His club obviously thinks he's worth that…

Between more ticket sales, higher ticket prices, playoff tickets, more merch sales, and possibly better TV revenue, a player that good can absolutely be worth it.

> should ... truly fair ... should be ... acceptable

How do you determine these absolutes? Why is your 'should' and 'fair' set at whatever value you're using, and not whatever value someone else determined?

The only 'fair' is what someone is willing to pay.

If you aren't willing to pay someone 200m... then don't. Why do you care if someone else is willing and does?

Fair in the sense OP is using it is in the moral sense, not the economic sense. Paying someone tens of millions of dollars when the lowest paid workers in that company make ten bucks an hour may be "fair" in the economic sense, in that it's what the market will bear, but I don't think it is any way fair in a moral sense.

I think too often people let the "morals" of the market replace actual human morals, and assume that because the market is "free" or essentially some uncontrollable algorithm, anything it does is moral by human standards. It's easy to throw your hands up and say "oh, well that's just what the market will bear" and assume all moral responsibility has been accounted for. But I disagree.

What's the morals of stopping two consenting parties paying each other whatever they want for something entirely legal?

If you think it’s fair in an “economic” sense, consider that Amazon employs 1.1 million people. That’s a decent sized city and a very complex economy. Austin Texas for example is about 10% smaller and home of both Elon Musk and a large number of people who could be making more money at amazon’s lowest paying job.

Because firms doing this has negative externalities - to be able to do this they are always going to be exploiting other workers or consumers, or competing in ways which harm society as a whole.

To be clear… just creating this kind of wealth imbalance in society is itself a form of harm.

You think a single individual (who didn't start the company I might add) should make 200 MILLION dollars.

We have a different value system.

> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.

This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?

> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.

The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.

>Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes?

Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.

And if you think you are and you're using the "free market" as a factor, well then I'm sure you think BTC should of ever been worth 60k or that Tesla should be worth $900 a share.

It's incredible that people plant their morality within the confines of a "definitely rational market that's definitely not experiencing a bubble".

You're entitled to your opinion, and by all means share it—but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.

Agree to definitely disagree. No apologies.

> Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.

Again, it doesn't matter if I'm smarter, more efficient, or "more important" than 5 janitors; what matters is how much money I can help the company make and how hard I am to replace. If I'm enabling the company to make 10X more money than the efforts of a janitor could yield and I'm very hard to replace, then I see no reason why I shouldn't be paid more than 5 janitors combined (granted, this isn't a great comparison because a janitor is more of a cost center, but you get the point). It has nothing to do with who the janitors are as people or who I am as a person, it's purely about money. Also where did you get the number 5 from? Why not 6 or 4? This is what I mean when I say this is very arbitrary.

> but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.

You seem to believe that companies exist to provide good paying, "fair" jobs, when infact they exist solely to make money. People are paid based on their ability to contribute to this, full stop.

Hahaha, of course you don't see that. You're talents are rarified and frozen in amber (you work in an opaque, cut throat, morally bankrupt industry that headhunts just for the sake of taking talent off the market).

I 100% agree that's it's arbitrary, and my figure wasn't a source of categorical, universal truth, but guess what? The hardest questions in life resides squarely in a GREY area.

I'd even argue that your intense rationality and reliance on systems (no matter how ineffective, or even untrue) is a crutch because, in theory, you will always be at odds with the proletariat.

And what good is that?

Ah yes, I am a dirty member of the bourgeoisie who needs to be shot in the square by the true patriots such as yourself!

How are you defining the proletariat in this sense? It seems to me that both the janitor and the OP are trading labor for wages.

There are people, namely Amazon shareholders who are happy to pay that money.

It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.

People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).

There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.

> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.

Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium. The shareholders think this is a fair salary. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Sure, the salary is high, but it seems commensurate with the value that Amazon generates. Literally 30% of the entire internet runs on AWS, and that's just one part of their business.

Given that Tim Cook earns ~100M yearly, and Satya Nadella is at ~50M yearly, it seems low in comparison.

> Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium.

This is absurd. "The market" is amoral: it's just a collection of human behaviors that are shaped by laws, culture, and customs. All of those can change, the law can change quite easily.

> "The market" is amoral

Yeah, exactly. Fairness in the marketplace is purely a math problem, no morality involved.

But fairness without morality is just a nonsense. It’s an equilibrium. fairness requires some moral perspective.

> fairness requires some moral perspective

It does not; you might be thinking of "justice." Even animals have a primal sense of fairness without the moral baggage (e.g. every dog gets one treat, etc.).

I take you point in part (justice is the stronger version) but fairness as you describe only occurs in social animals which actually do have a more complex definition of fairness than simple equality. Chimp ‘morals’ would include the notion that high status individuals “deserve more” - which I think is simple moralising which goes beyond equality

> justice is the stronger version

I think we have a disagreement here. Justice and fairness, in my view, are two distinct categories. Fairness is not always just (e.g. separate but equal), and justice isn't always fair (e.g. affirmative action). There's occasional overlap, but the overlap is incidental, not contingent.

I think you don't understand the difference between equality and equity.

I don't believe everyone should get the same slice. I just believe that 200 million is a far cry from your salary. If that was untrue you wouldn't be talking shit on a message board.

I feel like you’re using the word “fair” in an econ 101 sense, not in the way most people use it.

“The market reached equilibrium” with child labor and indentured servitude. Most people consider child labor unfair, so law/culture/customs changed how the market operates.

Even within the narrow definition of “fairness” in economics you still have externalities. This can become really tricky and require ethical considerations beyond a “pure math” problem.

> Most people consider child labor unfair

No, they consider child labor, slavery, indentured servitude, etc. unjust. You could easily come up with a thought experiment where every child (prince or pauper) has to partake in forced labor. This would be fair, but it would still be unjust.

Comparing wild outliers seems seems like expectation grooming.

How about lowest pay at company compared to highest? It can cope with variations in industries and even among companies.

The often-cited notion that a warehouse worker has even remotely the same responsibility as a company CEO is just straight-up fiction. Ergo, their jobs are incomparable.

I'm not so sure. Stakes may be higher but feels like CEO performance doesn't correlate strongly to education, past experience, class, or anything really. So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.

> So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.

Do you think any shareholders would vote for such a strategy?

My guess is corporations will fight any sane limits to their power and accumulation of wealth. And those at the top of corporations even more so. Which is why we have a government to balance the needs of the many against the consolidated power of the few who would exploit them

I agree, and I think the argument "well most of it is stock" is also bullshit. Comp is comp; warehouse workers could be granted RSUs, but they don't (afaik) because reasons. Every dollar he's compensated could be compensation elsewhere. Every share; to someone else.

A classic counter-argument is "well who gets to determine what is fair". I'd counter that with: who determines how much value he, inextricably and uniquely, has added to the company? It's all a farce. No one actually knows (but, oftentimes, the people at the top have bunk reports to justify their position, a privilege line workers don't have).

We need a law which at least begins to lay the foundations for something like: the total all-sources hourly-adjusted compensation for the highest compensated person (employee, contractor, anyone) in any company cannot be more than 1000x the lowest. Regardless of the specifics, the thing I love about that wording is: Amazon absolutely could not afford to pay all of their people $212,000+. But by them saying that, they're in-no-uncertain-terms saying that they're totally unwilling to lower Jassy's comp; drop it to $65M, and now lets try again, can you really not afford to pay everyone at-least $65k? Big Boy Jassy wants a raise, you gotta find the money for everyone; and if you can't, is he really doing that good of a job?

"The talented execs will leave" and go where? Europe? China? Good! The US has massive talent at every traunch of a typical company. Get out! There's dozens of people inside your own company who could do a better job in your seat than you, for a tenth the price, and the only reason they're not sitting there is the gatekeeping every board and exec team participates in to defend their throne.

> warehouse workers could be granted RSUs, but they don't (afaik) because reasons.

They were until a few years ago.[1] IIRC, Amazon rolled out an ESPP that was exclusively available to employees not compensated with RSUs.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/653597466/amazon-sets-15-mini...

So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.

Because they can privately buy the regulators who can then make them even richer. If you place that much influence in the hands of anyone, it will be misused for personal gain.

1. If the regulators can behave so unscrupulously, making Jeff Bezos poorer won't solve that problem.

2. Wealth and influence are always used for personal gain. That's kind of the point, no? People are incentivized to work and earn money exactly so they can use it to make their lives better.

1. They could be more easily bribed by his competitors, or even by the government to do their jobs. It's less power to him.

2. If your goal in life is to maximize your own self interest without regards to how it impacts the society as a whole, then yes I agree.

> Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich?

Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insufficient resources and services regardless of how much money the rich have. When you frame the issue as wealth inequality, then bringing Bezos's wealth down without any concomitant increase in funding for the poor is a victory as the delta is being reduced. Certainly the rich will need to be taxed more to pay for additional services necessary to improve the lives of the poor and middle class, but explicitly lowering the wealth of the rich doesn't need to be in scope to solve the problems we are facing.

Second, no one wants to admit it and by saying it this comment will get flagged, but people care because they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything complex.

> they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything.

Yep. It's the same jealously when people are paid millions to just shoot a ball in a hoop. Like, no. You shoot a ball into a hoop and have people who will pay $1000 to watch you do it.

One of my favourite punchlines:

Tapping with a hammer $2.00

Knowing where to tap $9,998.00

>It doesn’t make your life objectively worse

If my taxes go up to fund plants / warehouses for profitable companies I am objectively worse, am I not?

Absolutely, we need to abolish taxes and the government.

I don't see why your solution to your taxes should be "let's make the government control even more of the private sector via more regulations".

Get rid of the public sector and everything will move according to value for the customers, instead of who can bribe politicians better.

because the rich use their wealth to buy instruments that sway public opinion at the expense of everyone else?

Except for you. It's just the rest of the public which is dumb, of course.

He is part of the public, he falls to ads just as we do too.

It's always the opposing side which is brainwashed.

The hn bootlickers really come out hard when someone suggests that wealth inequality can't be fixed by unregulated capitalism. Won't someone think of the oligarchs?

The commies are here to give an actual argument, finally. Won't somebody listen to them?

its not a "job" it is leadership.. an appropriate analogy is closer to Roman General than school bus driver

within their own circles, competition is fierce.. part of the stature of a modern leader is in the dollar value, much less of the ornamentation and ceremonial weaponry of old.. bankers like it better now

Who determines what fair is? What makes you more well equipped to set the rules here than the market? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.

Over 10 years

This is a stock grant that vests over 10 years, so averaged out it's 21 million a years. Saying that his salary is 212 million is straight misinformation

Why not?

You’re quite active and emotional in this thread, but you failed to do basic math, or just didn’t read the article. It’s not 200/y, it’s 210 in 10 years. That tells something you need to know as well, those little details.