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US Bosses Now Earn 312 Times the Average Worker's Wage, Figures Show (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The chief executives of America's top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute. The rise came after the bosses of America's largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees' wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year. The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to one; that figure had risen to 58 to one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker. CEO pay dipped in the early 2000s and during the last recession, but has been rising rapidly since 2009. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1% in the dust. The bosses of large firms now earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1%.
And this is why capitalism will not be around for much longer. It totally puts the world upside down.
And what is the alternative? The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy. For myself, I don't care that some people have much more than me, I am more worried that I don't have more. The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What we have now is an oversupply of labor. Supply and demand is a two way street, but it's tough to get folks to acknowledge that because nobody like to think of themselves as a simple commodity. We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes.
I think you are slightly off the mark here. What we have is suboptimal distribution of labor. We have a huge oversupply of unskilled labor and well educated laborers without a specific skill set (think liberal arts majors), while we have a severe shortage of highly skilled laborers (doctors, airline pilots, engineers) and a moderate shortage of skilled trades (construction, electrical, plumbing, steelworkers, welders, etc.).
The reason for the shortage of highly skilled professionals is because of market distortions (e.g., prohibitive cost of malpractice insurance for doctors, or abysmal pay and terrible work/life balance of practically all pilots who don't fly long haul international) and for the shortage of skilled trades the reason is that for the last 30 plus years every kid has been told "you have to go to college to get ahead unless you want to end up with a crappy job as an electrician or construction worker." It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are. There's a lot of folks who don't want to see those productivity gains distributed more equitably because it's a point of pride for them. At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare.
I'm afraid you lost me here. Also, what does single payer healthcare have to do with any of this? Could you explain?
Then again I've also noticed a lot of those single payer healthcare opponents qualify for Medicare and/or the VA....
Well, those programs aren't freebies. For Medicare, you are forced to pay into it your entire working life and for VA medical care it is a benefit given in exchange for military service. Most jobs in the military are rather underpaid when compared to their civilian equivalents, which is part of why military veteran benefits are as generous as they are. That and being constantly deployed and away from your family sucks.
Now, if you don't like Medicare benefits or the benefits offered to veterans, you are free to lobby to reduce or remove them.
The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy.
The problem is that it rewards being greedy, and it rewards higher greed with higher rewards. This way, a questionable trait is amplified.
The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
Funny how the rest of the world has that one figured out. It is not a lack of plan, it is a lack of want. Too many people profit from the current situation.
The same happened in Germany, just the other way around. We had a perfectly workable pension system, which had survived both world wars and was doing ok. There were some issues that needed adjustments, and a problem of money being squandered on non-pension issues. But it was a state-run system and thus generated no profit for anyone. So in a two-decade campaign, the public was convinced that the system was utterly broken, would fail real-soon-now and they themselves would receive tiny pensions if it is not completely reworked. Then it got completely reworked and turned into a hybrid system where you get minimal payout from the state-pension system (that anyway you pay in as much as before) while having additional private insurance-based pensions with tax incentives to make people go there. Ten years down the road it turns out that people now get exactly what they were threatened with: Tiny pensions even after a life-time of work. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense until you realize that the main thing that changed is that the insurance industry has a new market and is making really nice profits from it.
Same with your healthcare system. Follow the money. Someone would make less money if you had proper healthcare, and that someone is fighting tooth and nail, before and behind the curtains, to keep the system as it is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Probably a significant improvement in performance by the $1M CEO (there was a study that showed that lower-paid CEOs tend to perform better).
The idea that CEOs should be paid according to the improvement in the bottom line that they bring is flawed: there is no equivalent downside if the company does badly under their leadership. Yes, their total pay may drop a little, but imagine if it could go negative!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'd hazard that if one individual is worth 312x any other individual in the company it's pointing out a fundamental problem with the structure of your business.
If you earn more than 100 times salary, your taxes are 70% per dollar above that.
Earn above 200x, taxes are 80%
Earn above 300x, taxes are 90%
How much is enough!
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
It is a truism that new systems arise due to a failure of the old...
... but had you lived at the times when Capitalism was emerging, you'd have been vehemently against it, because it was the new, radical and scary thing.
Capitalism, as in private ownership of the means of production, arose, partly, as a result of the "Tragedy of the Commons". (c.f. The "Inclosure Acts".) Certainly this is one 'solution' to the problem, but it's a solution that comes with its own bag of problems, notably the enriching of a few at the expense of the many.
Funnily enough you mention political conservatism as a beneficiary of capitalism but, while you're not wrong, it's only since the late 1970's that the landscape of the political right morphed from being social conservatism, i.e. those elites considering and caring for the plebeian masses - albeit partially only because it was in their self interest to do so (vive la revolution still being somewhat fresh in people's minds), to free market conservatism, i.e. dog eat dog, may the 'best' man win. Of course the problem with the latter is that capital grows capital: if you're at the top it's relatively easy to stay at the top; if you're at the bottom it's extremely difficult to climb out from under all those lying on top of you.
And yeah, it is obvious that given the scale of human technology today, Capitalism, at least on a planetary scale, has exhausted itself. Capitalism is prone to producing exponential solutions. The problem is, these are unfeasible in a world governed by the laws of physics. You need someone to put, so to speak, limits to growth on this solution if you don't want to die in your own poo. And that isn't something Capitalism can do.
Perhaps not quite how I'd have phrased it, but, yeah, pretty much spot on!