1. Who is asking for $100/hr at this level?

2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.

What a strange comment imo. I can’t take the ‘everything will go up!’ stance seriously while higher ups are buying 10 houses and private jets. The wage gap is atrocious.

By the way, Switzerland’s GDP is 748 billion vs the United States’ 20.94 trillion. Comparing them like that is meaningless and silly.

>Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help

Can you show your work here? Assume Amazon executives cut their salaries to 0, how much extra would they be able to pay workers?

Everyone would get 213 dollars a year extra if just their CEO didn't receive any compensation. Amazon employs approximately 1 million people in the United States and Andy Jassy received 213 million total comp in 2021.

That ~200m (really 61000 shares) vests over 10 years though. So really ~20 bucks per employee per year.

> Everyone would get 213 dollars a year extra if just their CEO didn't receive any compensation.

Wow, then they can buy an extra starbucks coffee now and then. That would surely change their life.

So, practically none.

Better off in Jassy's pockets then?

Their example was only a single person cutting salary, so practically meaningless. And I would also argue, in bad faith with the design of proving a point with bad data.

Feel free to pick a representative group of executives for your purposes; it really won't make any difference.

It’s something like $300-1000/yr more if we average over all Amazon employees, depending on who counts as “executives”.

If the high pay is truly attracting better performers (which I admit is unlikely) they could easily be benefiting the company’s workers a larger amount by increasing demand. Or maybe not and they are kinda useless , but in any case the total cost isn’t that high.

That doesn't pass the sniff test.

Amazon allegedly has about 1.6 million employees. Assuming that the "executive" class is a trivially small number of them, and that the average employee works say 2,000 hours per year, you're suggesting that the cost to Amazon of paying those executives is somewhere between $960B and $3.2T per year.

The high end of that estimate is about one fifth of the total earned income for the entire U.S. economy.

> 1. Who is asking for $100/hr at this level?

Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars. And if you claim that everyone needs to make decent wages, who is to define what "decent" is supposed to be? People will always be asking for more, never less.

> 2. Maybe CEOs and executives don’t need to pay themselves such absurd salaries, that would probably help.

Even if CEOs gave up their whole salary tomorrow, it would not change the pay of people working in very large companies with dozens of thousands or hundred of thousands of employees.

> Why not? If you can double every few years eventually you will get to 100 dollars.

Huh? That isn’t reasonable at all and I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith because of it.

With inflation 100 dollars will become very reasonable soon enough.

The social effects of this seem to be really good, if you look at quality of life in Switzerland.

If wages at the bottom go up and that causes inflation, the overall impact of that is wage compression, or in other words, reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.

>reduced income inequality. Which is what we want.

Reducing the PPP of rich people while only maintaining that of poorer people seems like a dubious policy outcome, at least in economic terms.

That's not how it works. The increase in income in the lower quintile outpaces inflation.

Well, it wouldn't outpace inflation right now, shit is crazy. But usually, yes.

Prices in Switzerland are somewhat similar to or a bit higher (and certainly not 10 times) than the US, except for meat.

Try saying that again after paying 16€ for a kebab in Basel compared to 5€ in Germany, a few kilometres to the east. There is definitely a difference.

This not accurate. Eating out, for example, is very expensive there, even compared to major cities in the US.

I am not really a restaurant person, but when eating in LA or SF, while the prices were cheaper than Swiss prices, the difference was not huge after factoring in the "mandatory" tipping common in the US.

Interesting, do the swiss eat less meat as a consequence?

While I do agree in principle that rapidly increasing wages leads to price inflation, your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland (most recently was there on Saturday and will spend the next few days there starting tomorrow.)

> your reference does not relate to my experience in Switzerland

Living in Switzerland is clearly way more expensive than living in any of its close neighbors, so please explain me how this is not related to higher wages.

But... aren't wages in Switzerland also higher than their close neighbours? It's the same thing in Norway - everything seems expensive for visitors, but wages are much higher too.

The point is that once you raise wages, the cost of living automatically goes up. You don't make everyone rich, you end up paying more for everything.

Wouldn’t this situation make imported goods cheaper for everyone?

Yes, and the quality of life for a physical worker is much higher than for someone from the US. What's your point?