From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Tue Sep 11 2001 - 17:02:41 MDT
charlie@antipope.org (Charlie Stross) writes:
>Three problems, actually.
>
>The corporate problem: bosses are supposed to run companies for their
>shareholders, not for their own pockets. Private companies: the bosses
>_are_ the shareholders, so that's okay. But these figures point to
>the executives of public corporations ripping off their shareholders.
If this were a significant problem, I'd expect people who get most
of their income from stocks to be more concerned about this than
people who own few stocks, and I'd expect CEO pay to be lower in
very competitive industries than in monopolistic industries. I see
little evidence that either is the case.
>The social problem: a widening gap between the remuneration of the
>bosses and workers is divisive and encourages social unrest. A lot of
I don't see much evidence to confirm the hypothesis that it causes unrest.
Robert Frank's book "Luxury Fever" has a more believable version
of this kind of claim: people's happiness is strongly influenced
by their relative wealth, and inequality often does more to make
people unhappy than changes in absolute wealth.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Dmitry Sklyarov! http://www.freesklyarov.org/ http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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