When will we learn to stop making these silly calculations about "productivity" and understand that people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity?
Any factory in China can replace most of their 160k employees overnight if they wanted to. How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?
There’s only one Tim Cook in the world. But, there’s also only one me in the world.
CEOs don’t get paid so much because they are personally unique. Every human is globally unique; it’s a consequence of how complex humans are.
CEOs have artificial scarcity because of the hierarchical structure of companies. By definition, there’s only one CEO of Apple.
Does that mean that ONLY Tim Cook, out of billions of humans, could have brought Apple to the success they have today? Try this thought exercise: if Tim had stayed at Compaq in 1997 instead of jumping to Apple, what are the chances that he would be CEO today of a Compaq worth $2 trillion?
“How much of Apple’s success is personally attributable to Tim Cook” is a perfectly valid question to ask. Unfortunately, answering it is extremely difficult; you’d need to rerun history for each alternate person. But the weight of a process doesn’t guarantee that it finds an optimum.
CEOs benefit from a human tendency to attribute systemic qualities to individual things or people. It’s the same reason we say a jacket “is warm” even though all it is doing is trapping the warmth that we created ourselves. We say a “successful CEO” instead of “the CEO of a successful company.”
Tim Cook makes incredibly consequential decisions every day. But the reason they are so consequential is mostly because he is the CEO of a huge company.
The negative effect of the current thinking on CEO “scarcity” is visible in the absurdly outsized personal rewards that the CEOs of successful companies get. But it’s even more visible in what happens to the CEOs of companies that are not successful. They still get absurd rewards! Adam Neumann also became a billionaire.
> CEOs don’t get paid so much because they are personally unique. [...] CEOs have artificial scarcity because of the hierarchical structure of companies.
They get paid proportional to the impact of their decisions, not in proportion to their scarcity, skill, etc.
If Apple must have someone to make decisions every day that could cost the company millions of dollars, what is the correct amount to compensate that person?
And if Apple were instead a $50M market cap company, would that amount change?
CEO compensation is a combination of "someone has to be in the chair" + "how important are our decisions?" + "how much can we afford to pay."
To reach back to the GP's gripe: if 1 (or even 160,000) assembly workers screw up at their job, it has a much lower impact on Apple as a whole.
Probably thousands? Just put a job ad for "Apple CEO" out there, set pay at a generous 10 million/year and I'm pretty sure you won't have issues finding qualified candidates.
I really don't think Apple's valuation would change much if Tim Cook is replaced, so I don't see what justifies such a large bonus.
I think this is ignoring the risks associated with such a change. You might find people qualified on paper, but you really don’t know how that translates into real world performance until you try it.
The risk of getting that wrong and accidentally destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value (don’t like the term, but it seems appropriate here) is very high (low likelihood, extremely high severity).
As a board member, why would you take that risk, when not taking the risk is so cheap? Ultimately I don’t think the risk weighted expected return on finding a cheaper CEO is greater than just paying Tim whatever number he pulls out of his arse. I suspect expected return is actually substantially lower (probably very negative) than what Tim gets paid.
The risk is being taken primarily by the employees and the shareholders, but many of the rewards go to the CEO.
Boards of directors are scared of getting it wrong, and they memorialize that fear in contracts that throw tremendous amounts of money at their preferred candidate, often making guarantees regardless of performance.
But it’s not like boards have a spectacular record on picking CEOs in general. Well-regarded people blow it as CEO every year, but they still get tons of money. Why? Because of this deep belief that “CEO-quality” people are extremely rare, so every plausible candidate is incredibly precious.
To be fair, business boards are not unique in this failing. Professional sports teams fall into the same trap all the time.
I perfectly accept that CEO pay in general is completely out-of-wack with anything anyone would consider reasonable, and agree that being paid $750mil is nuts.
What I take issue with is the idea that companies and boards are making irrational, or economically illiterate, decisions by paying CEO this amount. I just don’t think that argument stacks up.
As you say yourself boards don’t tend to be very good at picking executives, and may of them are probably aware of that. So why rock the boat when you’ve got a CEO who’s performing.
If you want to talk about the social consequences of CEO pay, that’s a different story. I would be quite happy to support the idea of CEO pay caps linked the lowest paid employee (I leave the question of what qualifies as an employee as an exercise for the reader). But I think that’s a very different argument to an economic argument.
Maybe, but how do you know who they are? Judging talent, especially executive talent at the outset is extremely hard.
It sure seems like whatever Tim Cook is doing is working. Remember when Apple went through three CEOs in a decade and nearly went bankrupt? Mismanagement of a company for even a few years can put a company in a tailspin for a decade. For a mature successful company Tim Cook is exactly what you want. Why mess with success?
Does Tim Cook staying around for another year mean the stock is 0.03% higher than it would be otherwise? If so, this is a wise decision from the Apple board.
Thousands seems high for the largest company in the world with potentially the most complex supply chain ever assembled. And that doesn't even mention the political issues that need to be navigated.
Your choices I imagine are the other Apple executives and the CEO of another International technology and/or manufacturing (potentially) company.
Right, all the people running Amazon, Wallmart, Nasa, BMW, Tesla, Spacex, managing contructuon of nuclear powerplants have no knowledge of supply chains.
You know, an iPhone or a macbook has more parts than an A380
"Similar" on the scale of a company worth $2.4 trillion isn't negligible. Nor is "difficult" or "risky."
There's one person in the world with a proven track record of succeeding leading the world's most valuable company over a decade. This compensation is a drop in the bucket relative to even a single strategic mishap by a less qualified candidate.
At that level there is no such thing as 'qualified candidates' like in a generic job where you just fill your positions.
There is no justification needed (in the traditional sense), but there was one anyway: board set a goal, Tim had to meet that goal, and then they'd give him the money.
Say Apple made a couple hundred billions under Tim Cook's leadership and the way was paved for more of that in the coming years (keep in mind that there is no day-to-day, this really is many-year-planning; you practically have to predict the future to some extent), is a fraction of that really such an odd case to pay the person that did that?
Sure, you don't need that much money to live comfortably forever, but this is capitalism, I doubt the value created was needed either. But the board and Tim agreed and met their goal and thus the transaction was completed.
I think that's also silly calculation. Beyond a certain (admittedly unknowable) point, compensation becomes a meaningless number for the individual.
Would Tim Cook "rage-quit" Apple if they could only pay him, say, 75 million instead of 750 million? If yes, then it's pure greed. If no, then it's too much.
Is there something substantive behind that 750 million figure other than very powerful people just paying themselves as much as they can get away with? I think not.
It’s shares and Apple’s market cap is 2.44 Trillion. Effectively shareholders paid 0.03cents on the dollar for Tim Cook. In exchange they get a steady ship that slowly and surely increases in value.
Why quibble about such a small amount? You’ve paid 0.03% of your current Apple holdings for a decade of growth creating value many orders of magnitude greater.
I am quibbling about the fact that he (like other tycoons) sits on top of a giant pyramid of human labor, the majority of which earns just enough to make ends meet in a low cost of living country.
Sure, Tim Cook is a good person and deserves reward for what he has done and it should be "a hellava lot". At some point, however, that reward starts becoming absurd and nonsensical.
Market cap is not a real sum of money that actually exists and coupd be retrieved. You, the sharegolder, oan the company, and pay Tim Cook out of revenue. From that perspective salaries of upper management are not so trivial
It can’t be retrieved in one go. But provided every shareholder doesn’t try to liquidate their position simultaneously, then it’s a reasonable metric to use for determining how much shareholder value was lost when Tim was granted the shares.
Disregarding market cap as not real money would be like disregarding your checking account as not real because the bank operates a fractional reserve.
> Is there something substantive behind that 750 million figure other than very powerful people just paying themselves as much as they can get away with? I think not.
If you are already rich enough to retire many times over, why should you keep working on something that doesn't move the scale of your money (and consequently power and ability to do other things, including starting a new business that could disrupt your previous business?)
Think of it this way: a lot of the money that is being paid to Tim Cook is to ensure that he doesn't go to work somewhere else.
Can he turn Apple into a computer company that would focus on replaceable, modular electronics? Something like Fairphone, but on a bigger scale and with more resources, or that could have more runway without turning a profit? No, he can't. Apple is known for being a company that wants to integrate everything and needs to control all of its process. And for all the environmental talk, they would never sacrifice their bottom line to ensure their products are really green.
Could he turn Apple into an online education platform that leverage open source platforms and open hardware to make it as affordable as possible to everyone? No, he can't. Apple depends on the brand of exclusivity and premium products.
Apple is a hardware company that makes phones, pushes for a "green and socio-environmentally fair" agenda and also markets its computers to young people and the education market. Is it really that much of a stretch that this someone at Apple would be interested in working on these areas?
In any case, it's a sad state of the world when even the CEO of the richest corporation in the world can not be allowed to be interested in anything else that is perfectly aligned with the company's goals.
More likely, he can not invest in these kind of things without being called out for conflict of interest.
But anyway, you asked if there is any kind of job that he couldn't do at Apple. I just gave you a couple of examples. You didn't specify that it had to me something that he would be personally interested in doing publicly. I don't know him personally nor I care about him (or Apple) to spend more time and thought about the matter.
It's a very interesting topic, but clearly the investors/board got what they wanted so they are giving him the payout. It was tied to a goal and they got that goal. So presumably the people paying are happy to pay him that amount.
Would he have reached/pushed for a particularly aggressive goal for less? Could someone else have achieved that goal for less?
No doubt there is some element of personal relationships between everyone in the compensation committee and the ceo.
> If yes, then it's pure greed. If no, then it's too much.
I think these numbers are set by compensation committees of the Board of Directors using consultants that analyze other private and public company data. So if you have some small number of greedy individuals pushing for massive compensation based on stock performance, then that trickles through the industry. Cook doesn’t have to be greedy to just not want to be underpaid relative to market, even when the market is set by a few greedy individuals.
It is a race to the top. Solvable via regulation if anyone really cared, but I suspect no one really does.
> It is a race to the top. Solvable via regulation if anyone really cared, but I suspect no one really does.
Well put. I suppose no one cares enough because, after all, there aren't THAT MANY billionaire tycoons. And, sure, they perform a valuable function in putting many people to work and giving away millions of turkeys on thanksgiving, etc.
But now, we're in an era of billionaires racing each other into space and compensation levels which are "astronomical". It's in some ways a repeat of the age of robber-barons except I don't see it slowing down any time soon. Now I wonder what ended "the gilded age" ~100 years ago? Oh yeah, world war + economic crash.
I don't think anyone other than Tim could have done just as well. If you look at competing tech corps - HP, IBM, Sun, MIPS, SGI, DEC, Nokia, even MS - their run isn't as long, they fail to adapt after a strong start, and the wheels often come off in spectacular ways.
And that's with competent management. (Let's not talk about the multiple management idiocies that happened at HP.)
Apple is now one of the longest lived tech corps. IBM is older but a shadow of its old self. MS is a year or so older, but the rest of FAANG are relatively new.
Cook has kept the plates spinning and turned Apple into a giant revenue machine with a strong R&D back-up. I don't think that's a small achievement, and even if he's helped by the board and senior execs - which of course he is - it's still easy to underestimate the skill that goes into that.
Having said that - he's also turned Apple into a somewhat boring company. The products are nice-looking and usually functional but not particularly thrilling. They feel overpriced. And I suspect some opportunities in home automation, user content creation, and health have been missed.
Cook's Apple is an all-American bureaucratic behemoth - a kind of modern General Electric which keeps churning out high levels of competence, but not much inspiration or excitement, and not a little frustration and irritation over nickel-and-diming of users and developers.
Someone else might not have made Apple as profitable, but personally I wouldn't have minded a friendlier and more inventive and adventurous company.
I wouldn't have guessed (/remembered) it had been ten years of Cook, but what I do remember is people saying exactly that when he took over.
I suppose at some point all companies die/fade into obscurity/are different companies in all but name; maybe in 2080 or whatever we'll be able to say - ah, yep, knew it, Apple was for the dogs as soon as Jobs left, was only a matter of time!
Cook came to Apple only a year after Jobs did. Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and Cook joined Apple in 1998 (Jobs recruited him). So it’s hard to untangle their impacts. Apple became so successful in this century because of both great products and great operations.
To be fair Apple was already a giant rolling ball of success, and they have historically had an ingrained culture of caring deeply about their products above all else.
Any decisions that would affect their trajectory will get a ton of deliberation from a lot of smart people; i.e. there wouldn't need to be a ton of input or ingenuity from the CEO to see returns like those from Apple, imho.
Not to say that Cook isn't great or that it wouldn't be difficult to achieve that success.
I guess my point is that the leadership within Apple is a lot more diffuse than typical;
I believe most of Apple's value is from delivering a high degree of consistency and polish; owing to its culture of relentlessly developing the UX of their products.
Therefore the CEO's primary roles at Apple would be to maintain that culture, steer the ship into new segments, and discern when the public will care about those segments.
I think Cook has done a decent job of that.
Making it all possible with RnD and supply chain is another story, but also where Cook is known to excel so maybe I'm underselling him. Jobs had Cook so presumably Cook would find a Cook if he weren't Cook.
I don't know much about Microsoft but Balmer was definitely taking over a different beast than Cook.
I think it's laughable to assume that it was only Tim Cook who contributed to that. Indeed, where would we be if it wasn't for these handful of superhuman geniuses.
During his tenure the market cap has increased by about $2 trillion. How much of that value has Cook captured? A very small %. Perhaps even smaller than his actual contribution! You could easily make the argument that Cook is being exploited by the shareholders.
What has been the remarkably great move from Apple in the last 10 years?
Develop their iTunes store to provide more media and bring in-house productions to have a more of a moat?
Develop their own silicon to decrease reliance on others?
Develop products that can take advantage of their strengths, a la Tags?
Move into services as most of the world is getting more Apple-product saturated?
Extend ownership of their product lifecycles, by being hostile towards 3rd party repairs?
Offer financial services to allow the less fortunate to obtain your products?
I don't want to detract from the respect that's due for these moves, but they are not that far off the beaten path for a market leader looking to solidify it's position in it's place. Most other improvements to their products and services have been incremental. Of course, there is something to be said about not straying from the light, as other companies have done. However, I do think that Apple's valuation is somewhat tied to the buying power of the world, and on the timescale's we're looking at, more and more people are gaining access to Apples products as the world economy improves. All of these are great things, and of course I'm talking with hindsight, but to me these all feel like strategies that seem somewhat obvious and will generally work wonders when executed from the position of a market leader.
Maybe, maybe not, but I think the idea is that it's hard to say with certainty. Apple is large and complex enough that any number of factors could have lead to that share price increase. My personal opinion is that probably yeah he had a good chunk to do with it. But it's hard to say that with certainty, it's certainly worth discussing and not taking for granted.
- Because the people that already found a way to display the scarcity of their talent or abilities don't need to subject themselves to a system that measures them by their productivity.
- Because it is not on "us" to try to change this at an universal scale. I am all for people that believe in communist ideals and go to live on their own with like-minded people. The problem is those that take this to totalitarianism and think something like "communism can only work if it everyone does it"
- Because history has witnessed already many people that tried to change this reality without ignoring scale, and ended up causing more problems that solutions, destroyed more wealth and made the world worse than they started off.
> Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?
How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?
We can't even compare "productivity" in our own "profession", much less between different ones.
Fuck, even to think in terms of "professions" today seems so anachronistic... some of the best people I worked with were never trained, should we disregard them and go back to a world of credentialism and guilds?
> The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.
More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.
>
How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?
How would you measure your scarcity? It is similarly difficult. "Workers are paid according to their productivity" does not mean "there is a fixed mechanical pay formula based on lines of code or something".
> More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.
If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area? Wouldn't "can be replaced by machines" be the literal minimum possible scarcity?
> If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area?
Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.
But, just look at what happened when Facebook decided to not pay SF salaries to those that moved out of the Bay Area. That was just Zuck saying "if you want be anywhere in the world to work here, then I can also look anywhere in the world to hire people", which instantly made them realize that they are not that scarce anymore.
> How would you measure your scarcity?
- My employer finds someone that can do my job for less money than I am asking, so they replace me. I am not as scarce as I thought.
- Some other company will offer more money to do the same job I am doing currently. I am more scarce than I thought.
- I work on new things, show experience or an ability that not everyone in the company can - let's say I am now able to manage a team of developers or I can work on both the backend and do devops. My scarcity increased.
> Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.
But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people. Whether that is possible is independent of how we determine compensation.
> It's not that hard.
You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post. This is an unfair comparison.
> But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people.
No. Entrepreneurs will bypass them anyway, whenever possible and whenever profitable. The difference is that your idea of "paying by productivity" would make cheap labour expensive, consequently increasing the profitability of automating work process and accelerating the pace of replacing labour.
> You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post.
No, I am being descriptive of the current reality. You want to be normative about your idealistic method. So, yes, you have the onus of coming up with a system that could replace the existing one and be at least as effective.
This is a poor take. Productivity is meaningless, leverage and impact is everything.
Tim Cook working for one day could easily have a larger impact than most people will have in their entire lives because he has extremely high leverage.
Is it fair? Absolutely not, but life is not fair. I don't understand what moral obligation society should have to base compensation on productivity.
PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.
> PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.
Of course. "Pay by productivity" does not mean "pay everybody the same per hour of labor". Cook's output has greater influence on the company than any (or perhaps almost any) other employee at Apple. He should be paid commensurate to that output.
The company produces some amount of economic output in a year. This can be stuff or it can be innovation. That is the total productivity of the company. The sum of all productivity of its employees adds up to that value. Right now, people are paid less than the value of their productivity so there is money leftover for the company to either stick in the bank (profit) or reinvest in other things.
Not everybody is equally productive. Somebody who has more skill or knowledge in a profession like software engineering will be considerably more productive than a less skilled engineer. Among leftist circles, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find people who describe productivity as literally just "number of hours worked".
What about companies that produce negative value (say, an oil company that caused an environmental disaster)? Are the workers going to return part of their salaries back?
How many software companies got off the ground, hired people, PAID SALARIES, yet never got to see themselves become profitable?
How many companies would not even have existed if there was no risk investment done?
Money is not gifted to people by God. It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses. The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history and can change.
> It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses
Exactly. And history is pretty clear that nearly everyone is worse off when society decides how to spend money instead of letting owners decide how to spend money. It's why every first world economy has a massive dose of capitalism and a tiny dose of socialism in their GDP. And why a significant part of the worst economies of the world don't.
>The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history
Yet the poor (and pretty much everybody else too) in most of the world, if not all, today are vastly richer than the poor of the past.... Maybe there's a reason the world has moved away from the economic systems of the past?
I'm from former USSR and I can hardly stand this commie foolishness. Go to some socialist country like Cuba, Venezuela that have eliminated the inequality (like the USSR did before), then talk about 'moral failings of the society'.
Go to some country like the United States, where we have nice things like weekends and 40-hour work weeks because we had a rather successful labor movement in the early 20th century because of discussions like this. We used to have children working in coal mines, and now we don't largely because people spoke out. Thank god for them.
I think that the conditions of workers impoved in some countries after WWI because of Russia: politicians and entrepreneurs looked at what happened in Russia and decided to make the proletariat a bit less unhappy, because the alternative looked very very very bad
Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth. But in case of foxconn workers and Cook, everything is fair. Foxconn workers are not chained to the benches, that simply don't know any other place where they can earn more. And I think Cook doesn't bribe anyone to achieve such payouts. If anything, he's doing a great job developing a business.
> Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth.
What is corruption?
A software engineer doing the same work gets paid way more in SF than in London. State policies prevent free movement of labor between London and SF. State policies do not prevent free movement of capital across nations, as clearly seen by the number of megacorporations actually owned by weird subsidiaries in strange locations for tax purposes.
Corruption is profiteering from occupying position of power, or from having ties with people in power. For example, getting a well paid job without necessary skills, because you are a nephew of a company vice president.
As for software engineers, recently so many people here are up in arms against the return to the office... But still want to get paid 3x the guy from Indonesia. I'm looking for them replaced with cheaper developers, and what they'll think then about the remote work.
The USSR was an authoritarian hellscape. Most states in history have been that way. I am not convinced that deregulated capitalism is the only way to achieve non-authoritarian rule.
At the end of it's life, USSR wasn't a hellscape. It was a land of bored disillusioned people who knew the futility of trying, because the outcome was always fixed
Chances are anyone other than Tim could have done just as well?
Did you see what happened to Apple after Steve Jobs got fired? Have you seen what has happened to great civilizations after the roll of monarchical dice or even a democratic election?
Have you ever met a bozo? They exist and there's more of them than there are sane people.
Yeah, well, boards of directors don't take "chances" like that on 2.5 trillion dollar companies, and when they do, the shareholders start machinating replacements, like Scott Galloway attempted when Jack Dorsey started getting a lot of eye-raising ideas.
It's been 10 years since Jobs died and I'm yet to see anyone even speculate any other name that would've been better than Cook.
Your comment is typical from someone who thinks themselves to be smarter than the whole board. Or the investors that never challenged Tim's management, Or all of Apple's upper management who would love to find a way to take his spot and wouldn't care about exploiting some of Tim's weaknesses to dethrone the king...
I’d say it would be just about impossible to find anyone else capable giving such a wooden performance and unnatural fake excitement at product announcements. Perhaps a young Point Break-era Keanu? But even then, I’d actually believe when he says “whoa” as a new product is unveiled. So you’re right, irreplaceable.
A building is only as strong as its foundations. Companies are the same.
I'd say that the foundation Steve Jobs left (Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) was pretty damn important to that success, considering they still have essentially the exact same product lineup.
Same goes for MS, Windows, Office, Xbox did not all come about after Bill Gates' departure.
Not exactly. Tim Cook is not paid by either the value of his work, or his scarcity. He is paid by the EXPECTATION of the value of his work… kind of like how stock markets work.
His pay is an expression of the expectation of a lot of other people. His pay is opinion, not direct value. And you can't pick some random unproven person who may or may not perform as well, and say they are of equivalent OPINION. You could say there's a chance, even a good chance, that they're of equivalent value, but that's a gamble.
This is how weird pay disparities develop. It's not in any way that Tim Cook has personally done things worth that much, or that he's personally pressuring all those in charge of paying him to that extent.
Intentionally or not, the question Tim Cook presents to those with the power to keep or dismiss him is this: How much are you willing to bet that if you lose me, things break and everything sucks?
They are willing to bet $750 million.
That's what happened. How much would you be willing to bet? If it's far less, or if you want to kick Tim out anyway, how many are there of you? Are you heavily outnumbered or are you expressing a common opinion?
"people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity"
When will we learn to stop making these silly arguments about "scarcity" and understand that the only thing that matters is a position of power?
Einstein and Steven Hawking were unique and advanced the entire human civilisation, whats their net work? Is anyone except the mentally ill going to suggest we have more Einsteins that Tim Cook's lying around?
Does Putin's, Joe Biden's and Edison's power come from the same 'source'? Are you implying power come from scarsity? Do we have scarsity of politicians?
> people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity
So the less people there are who own the majority of the wealth on the planet, the more that is justified?
So their value is what, exactly? Scarcity by itself doesn't mean anything. There are diseases that are extremely rare, that doesn't make it more desirable to have them.
The rent seeking, wealth-siphoning people do need the people who build the stuff they live off. That's not true the other way around. You don't have to replace Tim Cook, you just have to get rid of him.
(edit: I don't mean Tim Cook personally, it's not intended as criticism of that particular person; but the amount of wealth such people (not to mention the people where the ratio is WAY more off) bind destroys so much productivity in the people that have to struggle as a result, that they would provide more value to the world and the people in it by not existing, than by anything they did or could possibly do)
While it would be difficult to replace someone like Tim Cook, this should not serve as an excuse to treat people as disposable. This attitude of disposability, which is exactly what your comment about replacing 160k employees implies, brings to mind barbaric labour practices of the past.
Nothing about any CEO is special other than they haooened to land in the cushiest gig known to man. They effectively just suck all the money out as opposed to the people quite literally making the products.
I can't wait until we are over this hump and our future selves are like 'fuck how stupid were we to let one asshole sit at the top and do nothing but PR while we all beat each other ober the scraps.'
See the rich have figured out that if you pay people almost enough to live they will spend their lives surviving and won't have time to look up and realize what's happening.
Love how you put productivity in quotes as if it's up for debate, and math is now plain silly as it goes against your narrative? Top class.
Celebrating maximum exploitation of workers by those with all the leverage & power and calling the decent consideration of another man's well-being silly, that's, well, I'll just say that I believe we can do better, sir.
Power centralization is an inevitable outcome of improved techniques. Centralized control imperfectly selects for highly specific skills that only few possess. One can attempt to regulate inequality and inform opinion to some extent, but this will become harder as we go forward due to their improved techniques enabling manipulation.
I imagine Tim Cook is good, but that good? How much of the success is because he does unique work? I mean, I can understand maybe from someone like Steve who was a visionary, but Tim? It looks to me more of an executor than a visionary. I am not saying he is a bad leader or anything, but 750 million dollars is a LOT of money.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of ~~Einstein~~ Cook’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
This reward was defined ten years ago. By definition, Tim Cook is unique in that he has successfully run Apple for ten years. The risk of taking on a new CEO is orders of magnitude greater than 750mn.
> When will we learn to stop making these silly calculations about "productivity" and understand that people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity?
You do realize that it's possible to disagree with that, right?
There are plenty of Tim Cooks around. THE Tim Cook is only in his position because of luck. Lucky to be born white white, in America and lucky in timing and connections.
Isn't this a form of tax evasion? By not hiring local people they avoid paying tax on their work. They also avoid any sensible employment regulations by outsourcing it to not so compatible with human rights China. In my opinion this kind of avoidance should be illegal. It does not benefit anybody except Communist Party of China and Apple.
More than one out of 160k. CEO are like president they don't do much, you remove Cook and replace it by another high level exec, probably nothing will change for Apple.
All the major tech compagnies have increased their value over the last 10 years, so it's def not because of their incredible CEO.
Any factory in China can replace most of their 160k employees overnight if they wanted to. How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?