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On August 07 2019 23:55 Pangpootata wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 23:39 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 22:53 Ryzel wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. That’s fair, but how are you getting paid? Is the money coming from the government, an agency that you work for, or do you have personal arrangements with families? Do you buy the medications/nursing materials yourself, or does something else provide that capital for you? All those things play a role in how much you get paid. While I personally view caring for elderly family members as extremely important and would pay premium for exemplary service, not everyone feels that way and so the market for higher paid skilled nursing just isn’t there (I think? Not sure though). Upon further reflection, it seems the issue is that as technology gets better and better, the component of value generation derived from human labor decreases and the component of value generation derived from capital increases, making capital investments more valuable/expensive and labor investments less, which leads to ever decreasing wages. What if the government subsidized all capital investments for start-up businesses? Government's money mostly, be it directly or indirectly through the pensions of the clients. Everyone is ok to pay tax for this kind of stuff in France, even our right (or at least the politics pretend to, they're trying hard to dismantle healthcare and our pension system). On August 07 2019 23:00 KwarK wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. Caring for the elderly produces value. Hence I wrote "monetary value". Another exemple : migrants working in the fields, the monetary value of their work is very very low, there is a reason why almost no one wants to do those jobs and it's mostly migrants doing it. They're producing our food! Or garbage collector, extremely important too, the list is long. There is a huge discrepancy between the monetary value of a work and its true value for the society. I'm not asking for a communist system, I truly believe in capitalism but definitely not in the way it is now, specially when we have to take into account global warming. The problem is definining "true value" for society. Value is a subjective concept and different people assign different values to different things. In a free market the value is determined by the participants in a transaction. If I want you to do something for me, both of us negotiate the value of that action and other people don't interfere.The alternative is to have some governing body decide the value of things, which is a violation of constitutional rights due to denying the freedom of negotiating private contracts between consenting adults. An exception is the determination of the detrimental value of negative externalities such as pollution, where society imposes a penalty for a transaction which benefits all parties involved but harms society at large. But it is also difficult to quantify the harm to complex ecosystems which have many degrees of freedom, where for instance global warming models having poor predictive value.
This is the stuff of pure fantasy and is a primary locus of the flaws inherent to free market reasoning. Literally no transaction anywhere has ever occurred in such a vacuum.
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On August 07 2019 23:39 nojok wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 22:53 Ryzel wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. That’s fair, but how are you getting paid? Is the money coming from the government, an agency that you work for, or do you have personal arrangements with families? Do you buy the medications/nursing materials yourself, or does something else provide that capital for you? All those things play a role in how much you get paid. While I personally view caring for elderly family members as extremely important and would pay premium for exemplary service, not everyone feels that way and so the market for higher paid skilled nursing just isn’t there (I think? Not sure though). Upon further reflection, it seems the issue is that as technology gets better and better, the component of value generation derived from human labor decreases and the component of value generation derived from capital increases, making capital investments more valuable/expensive and labor investments less, which leads to ever decreasing wages. What if the government subsidized all capital investments for start-up businesses? Government's money mostly, be it directly or indirectly through the pensions of the clients. Everyone is ok to pay tax for this kind of stuff in France, even our right (or at least the politics pretend to, they're trying hard to dismantle healthcare and our pension system). Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 23:00 KwarK wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. Caring for the elderly produces value. Hence I wrote "monetary value". Another exemple : migrants working in the fields, the monetary value of their work is very very low, there is a reason why almost no one wants to do those jobs and it's mostly migrants doing it. They're producing our food! Or garbage collector, extremely important too, the list is long. There is a huge discrepancy between the monetary value of a work and its true value for the society. I'm not asking for a communist system, I truly believe in capitalism but definitely not in the way it is now, specially when we have to take into account global warming.
Gotcha, but if you’re working for the government then your complaints about getting paid more should be directed towards whoever came up with the arbitrary hourly rate number, and you should contact your representative, get petitions signed, and try and raise public awareness so the government will change that number. They’re the ones dictating the value of your work for them, not the market. Granted their number was partially based on what they think is right based off the market, but that doesn’t help you now.
You raise another interesting point, which is that the value of a job has much less to do with what would happen if the job wasn’t done, and much more to do with how many people are able and willing to do it. Or I guess in other words, the demand of garbage collecting is high, but so are the number of suppliers.
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The laws of supply and demand does not always work though. For exemple the US healthcare is doing worse than its European counterparts. Having basic foods heavily subsidized in Western countries prevent many African farmers to establish themselves but at the same time it's still a stock option and anl increase of the price of rice or wheat (the price of rice doubled in the span of 3 months in 2008) can be devastating for millions of people, life endangering. Or in France our equivalents of Walmart have a monopoly of demands for many goods and abuse it. It's just from the top of my head, we have to carefully decide when to follow or not the laws of supply and demand or simply adapt it.
So all in all, I don't think money is an accurate representation of a job's importance anyway, so why not let people have decent minimum wages when we can afford it (and we definitely can) even if it's slightly overpaying them relative to their output?
Btw I'm fine with my salary, thank you for caring though.
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On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key.
Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well.
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On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well.
I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market.
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On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market.
I wouldn't say most major companies, but stock options are very common benefit for programming jobs in the US.
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On August 08 2019 01:28 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market. I wouldn't say most major companies, but stock options are very common benefit for programming jobs in the US.
Depends on the company. Of all my friends, only the one who works at Amazon has stock options
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Very common in the semiconductor industry in the engineering level to get stock. Bring me back to early 2019 please.
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The idea breaks down, if not only if the highest paid staff is paid in different ways than simply a salary such as a stock option, but when staff are hired as "independents" or as external contractors. Though I heard that places like Denmark have the lowest CEO to staff ratio pay in the world; I suppose a good start will to see what is different about Denmark. I suspect "everything".
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On August 07 2019 23:55 Pangpootata wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 23:39 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 22:53 Ryzel wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. That’s fair, but how are you getting paid? Is the money coming from the government, an agency that you work for, or do you have personal arrangements with families? Do you buy the medications/nursing materials yourself, or does something else provide that capital for you? All those things play a role in how much you get paid. While I personally view caring for elderly family members as extremely important and would pay premium for exemplary service, not everyone feels that way and so the market for higher paid skilled nursing just isn’t there (I think? Not sure though). Upon further reflection, it seems the issue is that as technology gets better and better, the component of value generation derived from human labor decreases and the component of value generation derived from capital increases, making capital investments more valuable/expensive and labor investments less, which leads to ever decreasing wages. What if the government subsidized all capital investments for start-up businesses? Government's money mostly, be it directly or indirectly through the pensions of the clients. Everyone is ok to pay tax for this kind of stuff in France, even our right (or at least the politics pretend to, they're trying hard to dismantle healthcare and our pension system). On August 07 2019 23:00 KwarK wrote:On August 07 2019 22:38 nojok wrote:On August 07 2019 21:05 Pangpootata wrote:On August 07 2019 21:00 Acrofales wrote:On August 07 2019 20:53 Pangpootata wrote:
If you are good enough to generate $10/hr and someone offers you only $0.50/hr, then you can go work on your own.
Perhaps working as part of a larger organization allows you to be more productive, e.g. making $12/hr in a company vs making $8/hr on your own.
But your effective personal minimum wage is the amount you make on your own and no organization can offer you less than that and expect you to take it. How does this "working on your own" work? Most jobs require significant capital investment as well as employees to be productive. If I am a trained "expensive machine operator" and generate $10/hour of value, that doesn't mean I have money to buy the "expensive machine" and do it on my own. Nor does it mean anybody is going to invest in me to buy an expensive machine, or even that I have all the other peripheral skills required to ensure the results of my operating the expensive machine actually generate the value that it does within the originally mentioned company... It is true that people with very specialized jobs can't survive on their own. But there are many things that almost anyone can do and the introduction of the modern gig economy makes working for oneself even more viable. E.g. How much will you earn from being an uber driver? It's hard to consider taking a job that pays way less than that. Dude, your view of work is fucked up. I produce absolutely no monetary value in my work, taking care of the elderlies, you'll probably have to redo what I did in less than 6 hours anyways, be it giving meds, washing them or whatever. Should I not be paid? Though I'm pretty sure my job is more important than yours and that I'm paid less. Also, who cares if some people receive more money than the value of their work? It's ok for the owners but not for some workers? Since automation has been rampant, productivity has skyrocketed while salaries crumbled, I let you guess where is the money. Look at the society as a whole, the goods are there for everyone, it's only a choice to share them more or less equally. At the moment it's even more unequal than it was when inequalities started the French Révolution. Caring for the elderly produces value. Hence I wrote "monetary value". Another exemple : migrants working in the fields, the monetary value of their work is very very low, there is a reason why almost no one wants to do those jobs and it's mostly migrants doing it. They're producing our food! Or garbage collector, extremely important too, the list is long. There is a huge discrepancy between the monetary value of a work and its true value for the society. I'm not asking for a communist system, I truly believe in capitalism but definitely not in the way it is now, specially when we have to take into account global warming. The problem is defining "true value" for society. Value is a subjective concept and different people assign different values to different things.
In a free market the value is determined by the participants in a transaction. If I want you to do something for me, both of us negotiate the value of that action and other people don't interfere.The alternative is to have some governing body decide the value of things, which is a violation of constitutional rights due to denying the freedom of negotiating private contracts between consenting adults. An exception is the determination of the detrimental value of negative externalities such as pollution, where society imposes a penalty for a transaction which benefits all parties involved but harms society at large. But it is also difficult to quantify the harm to complex ecosystems which have many degrees of freedom, where for instance global warming models having poor predictive value.
The bolded bit is missing a key concept, which is the resources the person buying a good or service has available.
If I want you to do something for me, and I pay up to $10, you're not getting more than $10. If I want you to do that same something for me and I can pay up to $1000, it's entirely possible that this "market" finds a different price for the exact same service entirely because the buyer is wealthier.
EDIT: Accidentally clicked post.
That's a problem. If you need to work for a living, and there's nobody who can pay up to $1000 in town, you end up taking pay capped at $10. There's all sorts of ways in which the market is not free. The other common one is when there's only one employer in town, they get to set whatever wage they want and people take it because the alternative is not having any money.
tl;dr most markets are not actually free, because they are constrained by aspects of reality like people needing to eat to live.
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You can go one step further: there is literally no such thing as a “free market” whatsoever. There are types of transactions that are relatively less noisy, easy to understand, and more predictable accordingly, but even those take place in a framework of imperfect information and burdened consumption choices.
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United States15275 Posts
On August 07 2019 23:57 farvacola wrote:
This is the stuff of pure fantasy and is a primary locus of the flaws inherent to free market reasoning. Literally no transaction anywhere has ever occurred in such a vacuum.
I don't understand why people take this idealistic notion of exchange - which is just bare bones bartering - and assumes it both reifies in real life and scales over the entire economic system. It's the equivalent of people taking Locke's social contract as a historical phenomenon instead of a speculative setting meant to serve as the intellectual basis of his political theory.
On August 08 2019 01:08 nojok wrote:
The laws of supply and demand does not always work though. For exemple the US healthcare is doing worse than its European counterparts. Having basic foods heavily subsidized in Western countries prevent many African farmers to establish themselves but at the same time it's still a stock option and anl increase of the price of rice or wheat (the price of rice doubled in the span of 3 months in 2008) can be devastating for millions of people, life endangering. Or in France our equivalents of Walmart have a monopoly of demands for many goods and abuse it. It's just from the top of my head, we have to carefully decide when to follow or not the laws of supply and demand or simply adapt it.
The laws of supply and demand aren't immutable in the sense of physics. They can be manipulated, and usually companies are incentivized to game standard economic principles when the bottom line works out in their favor. The EpiPen uproar a couple of years ago was a perfect example of how high barriers of entry + pressing individual need + a monopsony strangehold over a niche market can distort price signalling.
On August 08 2019 02:45 farvacola wrote:
You can go one step further: there is literally no such thing as a “free market” whatsoever. There are types of transactions that are relatively less noisy, easy to understand, and more predictable accordingly, but even those take place in a framework of imperfect information and burdened consumption choices.
For the briefest of moments, I felt Hayek's coffin shudder.
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On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market.
Looked at another way, 36% of employees working for companies with stock (this excludes government employers, nonprofits, partnerships, etc.) owned stock or options in their companies. This means that approximately 32 million Americans own employer stock through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, and 401(k) plans.
Top result on google: https://www.nceo.org/articles/statistical-profile-employee-ownership (no access though)
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On August 08 2019 03:03 CosmicSpiral wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2019 23:57 farvacola wrote:
This is the stuff of pure fantasy and is a primary locus of the flaws inherent to free market reasoning. Literally no transaction anywhere has ever occurred in such a vacuum. I don't understand why people take this idealistic notion of exchange - which is just bare bones bartering - and assumes it both reifies in real life and scales over the entire economic system. It's the equivalent of people taking Locke's social contract as a historical phenomenon instead of a speculative setting meant to serve as the intellectual basis of his political theory. Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 01:08 nojok wrote:
The laws of supply and demand does not always work though. For exemple the US healthcare is doing worse than its European counterparts. Having basic foods heavily subsidized in Western countries prevent many African farmers to establish themselves but at the same time it's still a stock option and anl increase of the price of rice or wheat (the price of rice doubled in the span of 3 months in 2008) can be devastating for millions of people, life endangering. Or in France our equivalents of Walmart have a monopoly of demands for many goods and abuse it. It's just from the top of my head, we have to carefully decide when to follow or not the laws of supply and demand or simply adapt it. The laws of supply and demand aren't immutable in the sense of physics. They can be manipulated, and usually companies are incentivized to game standard economic principles when the bottom line works out in their favor. The EpiPen uproar a couple of years ago was a perfect example of how high barriers of entry + pressing individual need + a monopsony strangehold over a niche market can distort price signalling. Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 02:45 farvacola wrote:
You can go one step further: there is literally no such thing as a “free market” whatsoever. There are types of transactions that are relatively less noisy, easy to understand, and more predictable accordingly, but even those take place in a framework of imperfect information and burdened consumption choices. For the briefest of moments, I felt Hayek's coffin shudder.
The Hayekian error in arguing that pricing is the de facto mechanism for both micro and macro transactional equilibrium is actually remarkably similar to Marx’s error in positing that money is a byproduct of capitalistic equilibrium. Money and pricing aren’t emergent manifestations of a perpetual calculation’s result, but are instead the situs of a great deal of conflict themselves!
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United States42004 Posts
On August 08 2019 03:20 CorsairHero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market. Show nested quote +Looked at another way, 36% of employees working for companies with stock (this excludes government employers, nonprofits, partnerships, etc.) owned stock or options in their companies. This means that approximately 32 million Americans own employer stock through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, and 401(k) plans. Top result on google: https://www.nceo.org/articles/statistical-profile-employee-ownership (no access though)
401k plans is the misleading part there. Through my 401k plan I own a nonzero amount of all US stocks but a negligible amount of any one stock. That doesn’t make me materially invested in the profits of my company.
The number of employees with access to discounted company stock as compensation is significantly lower.
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United States15275 Posts
On August 08 2019 03:23 farvacola wrote:
The Hayekian error in arguing that pricing is the de facto mechanism for both micro and macro transactional equilibrium is actually remarkably similar to Marx’s error in positing that money is the end product of capitalistic equilibrium. Money and pricing aren’t emergent manifestations of a perpetual calculation’s result, but are instead the situs of a great deal of conflict themselves!
It's funny. I actually ascribe immense credit to Hayek for tackling the epistemological limitations involved in managing and making decisions in highly complex, modern societies. It's a vital problem to this day and he was one of the first Western public intellectuals, to my knowledge, who couched it in non-academic terms. But it's clear in retrospect that "The Use of Knowledge in Society" assumes rational choice theory would work out the inherent kinks in how knowledge was unequally dispersed in the aggregate.
Besides the price gouging of monopolies, his theory fails to account for how knowledge acts as a contagion - it can be recursively inundated instead of distributed through a spectrum - through limited channels. Not to mention how exchange of information between individuals functions as social control and social signaling, leading what constitutes collective wisdom within a domain to converge and subsequently skew pricing as a mechanism that supposedly "reveals true preferences" (e.g. the role of derivatives in driving the mortgage crisis).
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On August 08 2019 03:43 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 03:20 CorsairHero wrote:On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market. Looked at another way, 36% of employees working for companies with stock (this excludes government employers, nonprofits, partnerships, etc.) owned stock or options in their companies. This means that approximately 32 million Americans own employer stock through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, and 401(k) plans. Top result on google: https://www.nceo.org/articles/statistical-profile-employee-ownership (no access though) 401k plans is the misleading part there. Through my 401k plan I own a nonzero amount of all US stocks but a negligible amount of any one stock. That doesn’t make me materially invested in the profits of my company. The number of employees with access to discounted company stock as compensation is significantly lower.
Half of public companies have some some equity plan.
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United States42004 Posts
On August 08 2019 04:54 CorsairHero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 08 2019 03:43 KwarK wrote:On August 08 2019 03:20 CorsairHero wrote:On August 08 2019 01:19 Excludos wrote:On August 08 2019 01:15 CorsairHero wrote:On August 07 2019 23:38 JimmiC wrote:
I was chatting with a buddy last night about CEO pay and we came up with the idea of making it a rule that a CEO could only be paid (total comp not just salary) 50x (could be 20 could be 100) his average employee's salary. All the sudden instead of making every decision to try to inflate stock price he would be trying to make his company viable while paying his people the most.
It would be bad for Ceo's and bad for stock prices but I don't know that it would be bad for the economy because all the employees would have more cash, which at lest in NA, always leads to much more spending.
Likely this is not the ticket. But I do think restricting how much CEO's get paid, and changing their motivations is key. Most major companies award stock through a gift or some purchase program. Employees can get in on the game as well. If the CEO's wealth is going up through stock appreciation or dividends, then shareholders are as well. I'm gonna need you to bring me a source on the fact that most major companies award stock to regular employees, or even allow them to buy it through a purchase program that isn't the stock market. Looked at another way, 36% of employees working for companies with stock (this excludes government employers, nonprofits, partnerships, etc.) owned stock or options in their companies. This means that approximately 32 million Americans own employer stock through ESOPs, options, stock purchase plans, and 401(k) plans. Top result on google: https://www.nceo.org/articles/statistical-profile-employee-ownership (no access though) 401k plans is the misleading part there. Through my 401k plan I own a nonzero amount of all US stocks but a negligible amount of any one stock. That doesn’t make me materially invested in the profits of my company. The number of employees with access to discounted company stock as compensation is significantly lower. Half of public companies have some some equity plan.
Available to all employees?
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EPT
