I was in Guatemala peacekeeping with the UN in the late 1990s. There the richest 1% of the population owned 99% of the country’s wealth and land, leaving most of the rest as very poor. The rich had to live in gated villas and estates, with guards armed with machine guns and walls topped with electrified barbed wire everywhere. They had to travel mostly by helicopter, as did their children, to avoid assassination and kidnapping attempts.

In the neighbourhood where we stayed in Guatemala City one rich man had been shot and killed by his own hired guards. I guess he didn’t pay them enough.

That was just the small stuff however. When I was there the country had just come through a 16 year civil war because the obscene wealth disparity had resulted in a popular communist guerrilla uprising that took all the government’s resources to contain. I was there as part of the UN force overseeing the subsequent ceasefire to the civil war.

In many countries the rich live like zoo animals, caged in and guarded, afraid to go out lest the poor, whom they have created by hoarding so much wealth, kill them.

I have learned that in an equitable society, where the gap between rich and poor is smaller, that both rich and poor are better off and safer, too.

I also am not one to say “I know the answer” to this, but there are issues that cannot be solved without a large lump sum of money coming from one place. With more equal pay, there would be no one who could fund expensive research that the government refuses to fund. Space-X and other similar ventures (expensive and/or experimental new industries, projects, and other things that definitely help the world) that would be unable to exist without extremely rich people funding them. There would need to be too many people to agree with how to run things and what the goals are. Having one person with all the money guide things helps it go smoothly.

With the increasing gaps between rich and poor, the poor also get dragged up as well. It’s a consequence of the exponential distribution (well, really, that as the poor get richer the richer get richer faster). Poor people today are at least a magnitude richer than poor people a century ago.

I’d recommend reading Paul Graham’s essays[1] for more insight.

This is anecdotal, since I do not know the source, but my one professor stated that personal “fun/dollar” from income levels off after $300,000 a year since the time it takes to make anything past leaves even less time to enjoy it. This does not mean that it should be a ceiling since the former argument still stands.

From the same professor, and also without a hard source, CEO:worker income ratios:

USA: 300
Europe: 30
Japan: 3

Anything more (at least in Japan) and the exec is shunned from exec groups. Honor code at work I assume.

@Eric: Most people wouldn’t live long enough.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/

Another thought – it is the actions of some of these highly paid “best” CEOs on both sides fo the Atlantic, who are responsible for the economic mess we find now ourselves in.

Final musing – to the families in the gutters of Mubai even a fraction of $22,050 pa would be a fabulous fortune. Somewhere along the line we lost our way. See Jesus’ radical teaching in Matt: 6 v 19-34

if things get bad enough, i think people will organize again. i’m afraid that these things happen in cycles and it will take a majority (or a large enough minority) of people feeling uncomfortable before the revolution comes. (-:

165 million dollars of bailout money is ultimately less money than thousands of low-level employees. A bonus is for now, a liability is for many years. :-)

At the moment, I am straddling the poverty line, but I have absolutely no problem with the current arrangement of things. People are paid $n+1/year, where n is a ridiculous number, for a good reason. It reflects supply and demand. Even in a totally communist system, supply and demand exists, except with the additional burden of trying to allocate resources without a price system. There’s no getting away from it.

And you absolutely do have to competetive in hiring a new CEO, especially with a company like Ben & Jerry’s. I’m not sure how much they’re worth, but I know they’re owned by unilever, who have to handle 40,000,000,000 GBP a year. Could you imagine having to manage all those resources? It’d be a nightmare.

A person with the ability to handle all that and more importantly, with the experience to back it up, would be in ridiculously high demand – and in any competetive market, you can bet they’ll be priced fairly. :-)

(Interesting stuff nonetheless. You’re always a good read, aysiu. Keep up the good work – I hope the great market in the sky prices your services fairly. :-))