“ A recent study showed the median income of major corporate CEOs to be about $8 million a year. That’s less than a third of what Alex Rodriguez earns and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes. But no one is denouncing them for “greed.” –Thomas Sowell
I think that both ARod and Oprah make too much $, especially ARod and other sports figures. That our society choses to invest as much as it does in entertainment figures is astonishing. I am really not a fan of either one of them, but ARod is an amazing athlete.
What is ‘too much’ money to you? Also, what is the criteria you use to define it?
For the record, I don’t claim to know what ARod, Oprah, CEO’s or even hedge fund managers (see here) ‘deserve’ to make.
No one denounces A-Rod as greedy? Huh? Have you been to Seattle lately, or Boston, or the half of NY who are mets fans. Have you read the sports pages lately or listened to sports call in shows. Everyone complains constantly of greedy athletes and A-Rod tops the list as the richest athlete of them all
My favorite part about Sowell is how he will make up something out of thin air to prove a point. The straw man argument.
His point is more on emphasis than on day to day events.
Just look at politicians…they denounce the CEO’s more than say the sports players or movie stars. Sowell is talking about the people who want government change.
So why didn’t he say that instead of making up something that is not true. Fact is that he does not have the facts on his side so he makes s**t up to prove his point.
Politicians denounce CEO’s more than ball players because CEO’s run companies that employee millions of employees and have hundreds of thousands of shareholders. Their pay is almost independent of the company’s performance. They have no accountability in their job because they stock their boards and compensation committees with peers who sit on each other’s boards.
Also by the way Oprah is the CEO of HARPO Productions who pays her those big bucks. so Sowell is arguing against his own point.
On the contrary, one can make a stronger argument that CEO pay has more positive externalities, see here.
I don’t have any set “criteria” for “too much money.” I have read that excessive CEO pay isn’t good for company morale. Have you read “The Cheating Culture” by David Callahan?
And in the years that ARod has been a Yankee, they have not managed to get to the World Series. If I am not mistaken, don’t the Yankees have the biggest payroll in baseball? While they are a great team, big pay doesn’t always equal winning it all.
Why do European and Japanese auto CEOs earn less but make better products? For all the money that American auto CEOs earn, you would think that they wouldn’t be losing marketshare in the automobile industry.
I agree that ARod has not been earning his pay but I’m sure Oprah has. In other words, I am fairly certainly that Oprah brings in more money than they pay her. The same can be said of many of the CEO’s under criticism, see here.
You ask, Why do European and Japanese auto CEOs earn less but make better products?
Have you ever thought of this as a possible reason?
Just as the HispanicPundit slams the Chicano Study students who discuss economics, I will slam non-engineers who try and tell me why Japanese cars are better than American cars.
The key words are Engineering and Design, if you are still building the same outdated 350cu in engine from 1950 what do you expect. If you took the plastic dash from a Japanese & American car and set both out in the hot sun the Japanese dash will last longer. If you slide an ass (literally) over the seat of a Japanese car a million times it will not tear like that of an American car.
American car companies did not invest enough money and hire the right engineers to design and build cars, the Chrysler K-cars of the 80’s were crap and no matter who assembled them they would still be crap. The large molded plastics door panels and dash on the Ford Mustang are just crap. The design of the 80-90 Corvette is also crap, to many plastic screws used to hold cheap plastic parts. This is the same problem with some engines which now used plastic parts on intake manifolds which are subjected to excessive heat.
The U.S. can design anything if it really wants to, such as military defense systems, i.e. avionics and guidance systems. But the car companies fell asleep.
The American car companies should have done what the Japanese did years before to the U.S with consumer electronics and just copy the engineering and design of Japanese cars. The U.S companies could have saved millions on design and engineering and built good cars by just borrowing from the Japanese cars.