Which is interesting because I believe traditionally when calculating production costs, you added materials required to produce an item and a hourly salary of workers making an item divided by the number of items they can make in an hour. You could throw in marketing and advertising bugdet too.

The management salaries weren't the part of the calculation. They were considered constant and therefore insignificant in the mass production.

But now, when your CEO makes 380x worker average, and the rest of the apparatchiks make the same combined, and you have 250 workers - then it is no longer wise to "optimise" worker salaries at all because they are by far not the biggest expense!

That's capitalism turned upside down. And I know it because I see how people are able to account for recurring costs but put a blind eye on development and management costs.

P. S. Maybe it tells us it's CEO/traditional management who need to be disrupted now. In some areas you can imagine a worker's cooperative paying 1.5x average salary to workers, outsourcing their management cheap, and still being insanely competitive thanks to no apparat spendings.