Not sure I agree. If a company was already in a downward slump and the new CEO keeps it from dropping even faster that may actually be doing a good job. Let's say the new CEO of a news paper company makes it so they only loose 10 customers a year instead of 15 cutomers a year that is pretty good for a dieing business. Doing the same can be considered good as well.

"Improving" a company also could be bad in our eyes. For an investor in a company "Improving" the company is making the companies value more. For example how some of the big box stores "improved" was by cuting variety and reducing staff size. This makes it hard for a customer to find someone to help them. I remember when Walmart use to have employees everywhere and now it's almost impossible to find someone to help you there. Also when I go to a Safeway the amount of different Ceriels/Candy Bars/Jams have been ruduced to the most popular ones, less than half of the variety there use to be. This is improving for the share owners, but not for the cutomers or employees.

sry i don't find it in english it's in german:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auswertung_der_PISA-Studien:_Einfluss_des_sozialen_Hintergrunds

this was a comparison between public and private schools and other things with the pisa 2006 results. on private schools, there are more people from families with a better economic status and in most countries, students from this schools were better (sure, they come from "better" families on average with more money) but if you calculate only students with the same economic status between those systems, so poor compared wit poor, working class compared with working class and so on, there was only ONE country where students from private schools were better than the ones from public schools. the country was canada^^ in all other countries, students from public schools were better or exactly as good as students from private schools. ah and they only looked at oecd members.

and even if your private schools for people with more money are better, i bet your public schools are very good as well. if not, you would have only very good or very bad educated in canada and only richer people would have the chance to get a good education for their children (which would be a terrible system).

and if this is correct:

"About 5.6% of students are in private schools", i don't see such a huge difference between the canadian and other countries systems? most go to public schools in canada as well or not? those few percent are also in other countries on private schools.

I meant if the company was stable already,

also I don't have the stat but the majority of the time a new ceo is put in place to restructure a company heads will fall that's just business so a lot of improving comes from money saved from employe salaries that were cut off. firering people might be bad overall for the economy and the population but it might save the business from going under so yeah in that case they kinda deserve the money, if they can do it without downsizing the work force they deserve even more money IMO

Unfortunately new CEOs often downsize for short term (5-10year) profit at the cost of the long term success of the company. Otherwise I would agree with you.

It matters as much as any other opinion that you may have. IMO it's quite normal for people to discuss these things, especially since many of us actually work at companies which have CEOs.

These types of discussions tend to follow onto that something must be done to cap the upper-limit on wages, which angers me, because people really don't believe in property rights, anymore. Hence my flippant comment.

There is a thing where a business would end up having a budget.  Businesses do need to evaluate what their CEO is worth.  What you have now is that the owners of the company are put in a place where they can have little to no say in what they management of their company is compensated.  The executives will play a game, pat themselves on the back, and pay themselves a ton.  The thing about exsecutive pay is the guys being paid aren't the owners of the company, they are hired hands that the owners pay to run something.  According to property rights, owners should also be liable for the things they own, doing damage.  However, a corporation is a government chartered exception to this, that enables absentee owners.  Thus, the normal standards of property rights end up getting bent favorably for the owners of the company so they can avoid liability.   It should be no wonder in such a situation, that executive compensation would get way out of wack.   You seen now in this environment that, because of the way things are, almost no executives ever go to jail, even if they had a big hand in the financial meltdown and wiped out the life savings of a bunch of people.  

Tell that to my dead relatives. I had an uncle die waiting for his doctor to find his file. I have a neighbor who died waiting for routine surgery. I don't want to get into all of my siblings who never made it because the health care in Newfoundland is disgustingly inadequate. We have a saying in my community, you go to the hospital to die, I'm not joking. All the while we pander to the super-wealthy. I don't know a millionaire that hasn't figured out a way around paying taxes. It really gets to me when the government doesn't close these loopholes or raise their taxes. All the while I watch my parents struggle, my father works at that damn hospital and we can not afford home care for my mother. Maybe if we were on welfare the government would pay for home care and actually take care of us. If my derision of Capitalism is misplaced then it doesn't change the fact that life is horrible where I live. Don't kid yourselves, it's not lovely everywhere in Canada. Top that with laughably inadequate education and everything from water that needs to be boiled to "roads" that have potholes and cracks that have become craters and trenches. Mentioning infrastructure, at least the lights stay on now without constant brown-outs. The unemployment is over 15% and that doesn't factor in people who have given up on finding suitable, gainful employment. My mother was shot at by a cop for breaking curfew, a mentally disturbed individual was shot dead for threatening himself with a butter knife, I've got an uncle who's doing everything in his power to defend himself from constant police harassment. A few weeks ago we had people joyride in a haulage truck, they tore up lawns and smashed cars and when called, the police didn't respond. They only took action after the next incident in which a police officer's private, civilian vehicle was hit. Maybe if they were selling a small amount of pot the cops would have done something the first time. Every person I have ever known to launch a justified lawsuit has had to pay many thousands of dollars just to take it to court. Then it always drags on for so many years that they can not finish fighting the case and the company always wins. The one case in which a dear friend of my parents' actually wins and they are intimidated by the company that they sued for criminal negligence. Guess what, they're still waiting for payment (which they will never see). Every aspect of this society is broken, there is nothing here for the average worker. Per capita, we are the most oil wealthy people on the face of the Earth and yet life here is terrible for the vast majority. I continue to commit crime not for the money, but because of what it does to our worthless government. Canada, Capitalism, Corporatism, the wealthy elite, they're all to blame in a way. I can not discuss what I would do if I could get my hands on them for it would certainly get me perma-banned from this site. Finally, just because Communist nations are still recovering from the decades of war and isolation that we subjected them to doesn't mean that their system is inherintly more flawed then our own. Sorry for the rant, seriously, I'm just in a bad mood and needed to vent. It's mostly just the pathetic medical treatment and police harassment that my family has had to deal with recently but life as a whole here is not what it should be.

TL/DR

The quality of live where I live is not as good as you would think. We have no reason to be satisfied with what we have just because others have it worse. The level of inequality in this region is appalling and Capitalism just doesn't work for the vast majority.

Wow, what a wall of text!
I don't mind CEOs earning what they earn but if the compamy is in the red they shouldnt get bonuses, that's all I ask.

What you don't seem to be getting is that your family is suffering in a government run health care system. This is not a problem with capitalism. All of the best medical systems in the world for quality and availability are two tier systems; and Canada is not even close to being one of the best systems in the world because it is a single tier universal health care system.

When I was studying economics in University, Newfoundland was used as an example of how excessive entitlement spending could ruin an economy. For decades fisheries and fishermen have exploited EI to maximize the amount of money that people in the community "earn"; but this has resulted in an economy where labour costs are remarkably high for a labour market that is so depressed. Essentially, fisheries were hiring people who's EI benefits were coming to an end, having them work until they were able to collect full EI again and then laying them off. With how high the benefits are, there is little incentive for these people to work for less than $20 per hour. This is too expensive for the companies of the future to pay.