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HappySqurriel on 29 February 2012
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Mr Khan said:
Pineapple said:

This really is completely useless without being able to read the study, though. If you put greed (ie, interest in obtaining money) as a solely unethical want, it's obvious that the people who have gotten money are greedy by that definition.

But if they had flipped it around, it can easily be seen the other way too. Rich people get rich by doing something beneficial for society. Whether it's betting your money that a company is going to be successful, or actually making the company successful. They do something that makes the world better, and get a personal payoff for that. The rich people are often the ones who made the world a better place on a large scale.

Honestly, the "the rich are evil" philosophy just seems more like a way of justifying that other people gained more money than themselves. "They were only more successful than me because they exploited other people!".

The way I see it, the result is simple. The majority of the rich people did one hell of a lot more good to the world than the majority of the people with less money. And, they got money back for doing that. If you call that greed, that's fine, I just think it's perfectly fair (in the majority of cases).

This is contrary to the labor theory of value in many cases, the theory that states what you get out of work should be proportional to the work you put into it. Of course, this then gets hazy when you're talking about people who are also playing with land and capital, but if you're talking about direct salary, there is no way that the disparity between executive pay and average worker pay can be justified. The only difference between a housewife who labors with turbotax and such to keep the family finances in line and a wall-street banker who does the same thing is that the banker commands a larger vocabulary and operates at a higher level, but the amount of labor is precisely the same, and therefore should be valued the same.


It depends on how you measure "work you put into it" ...

Someone who goes to school for 19 years putting in far more time to be at (or close to) the top of their class, and then spends 30 years working excessively long hours to develop the skill and experience to become an executive has put in tens of thousands of hours of work to be able to do 1 hour of work as an executive; in contrast, the pot-smoking high-school drop out has put no work into being able to do 1 hour of work as a janitor.

Certainly, I think the pay of many CEOs at gigantic companies has become excessive primarily because of how they're paid. If it was up to me, I would have the executives in any company I was invested in paid primarily through stock-options that matured in 5 or 10 years; they would have a very solid salary (probably $200,000) but if they want to earn millions of dollars per year they would need to make decisions that worked out for the company in the long run.