Re:Top-CEO Pay Isn’t Driven By Talent, New Study Says
by DanielBMarkham on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @04:32AM
(#9770355)
Four things spring immediately to mind.
1) This is research by a partisan think tank. That's not to impeach the source, only to encourage deep criticism about what the data is actually saying -- whether you agree with it or not. (In fact, I find that stories like this that I agree with I need to be especially careful of embedded spin because of the difficulty I have difficulty in seeing it.)
2) If we're all going to have robots working for us in 100 years, the effective ratio between the bottom workers and the top ones will be infinity -- that is, the entire idea of a happier future is machines doing all the grunt work and people just doing creative things that they find value in. This data may be a sign we are on our way there -- I'd be careful about destroying our future before we get there.
3) The measure here is being made with "comparably-paid workers" So the inference is that you can compare specialty doctors and CEOs, or stock brokers and CEOs. No matter how you justify it, I don't think such a comparison holds water. Are good stock brokers making 20x the money that bad stock brokers make? Perhaps. But does that mean that there would be a similar 20x range among CEOs? No, of course not.
4) I hate statistics-based social policy advocacy because there's always this underlying idea of the old "We take an aggregate number, make some broad generalizations about causality, then announce that the conclusion we had already reached before beginning our work is now evident." mentality. Carrots are poison? Sure, because 100% of the people who eat carrots are dead within 115 years. The only causal relationship I can come up with for CEO pay is the obvious one: highly-paid CEOs get that way because they manipulate the board into paying them that kind of money. This in itself is a skill. Creating large majorities of agreement among diverse stakeholders while maintaining a vision may also be a highly-paid skill among CEOS, and it may be related to their ability to manipulate boards, but even that is a bit of a stretch.
1) This is research by a partisan think tank. That's not to impeach the source, only to encourage deep criticism about what the data is actually saying -- whether you agree with it or not. (In fact, I find that stories like this that I agree with I need to be especially careful of embedded spin because of the difficulty I have difficulty in seeing it.)
2) If we're all going to have robots working for us in 100 years, the effective ratio between the bottom workers and the top ones will be infinity -- that is, the entire idea of a happier future is machines doing all the grunt work and people just doing creative things that they find value in. This data may be a sign we are on our way there -- I'd be careful about destroying our future before we get there.
3) The measure here is being made with "comparably-paid workers" So the inference is that you can compare specialty doctors and CEOs, or stock brokers and CEOs. No matter how you justify it, I don't think such a comparison holds water. Are good stock brokers making 20x the money that bad stock brokers make? Perhaps. But does that mean that there would be a similar 20x range among CEOs? No, of course not.
4) I hate statistics-based social policy advocacy because there's always this underlying idea of the old "We take an aggregate number, make some broad generalizations about causality, then announce that the conclusion we had already reached before beginning our work is now evident." mentality. Carrots are poison? Sure, because 100% of the people who eat carrots are dead within 115 years. The only causal relationship I can come up with for CEO pay is the obvious one: highly-paid CEOs get that way because they manipulate the board into paying them that kind of money. This in itself is a skill. Creating large majorities of agreement among diverse stakeholders while maintaining a vision may also be a highly-paid skill among CEOS, and it may be related to their ability to manipulate boards, but even that is a bit of a stretch.
Beware facile arguments about complex topics.