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I would actually be OK, with the CEO/worker pay discrepancy if the CEO was held criminally responsible for company wide illegal behavior. I would like a rule t

I would actually be OK, with the CEO/worker pay discrepancy if the CEO was held criminally responsible for company wide illegal behavior. I would like a rule that the CEO is criminally responsible for any company-wide illegal behavior. Even if they claim that they did not know, at their pay scale, it was their responsibility to know and thus they are criminally negligent. Under this rule, the WellsFargo CEO would be a convicted felon and had a prison sentence. This rule would do wonders to clean up illegal activity. Right now, it is in the CEO's interest to put incentives in place that can only be achieved via illegal behavior and then turn a blind eye to the behavior as long as the stock price goes up. This would change that and force them to actively try to keep illegal behavior from happening, since they now face prison time if it occurs.

pembrook 7y ago
This makes no sense. If you read Matt Levine, you know that literally everything a public company does can be considered securities fraud. It'd be impossible to run a public company if this were the case.
- qqqwerty 7y ago
  The OP is suggesting that CEO's face harsher penalties when criminal activity, significant enough to be investigated and prosecuted, is discovered. If 'everything is securities fraud', and those frauds are not worthy of an investigation currently, then those companies would not be impacted by the suggestion. But they would have an incentive to be more diligent, as a precautionary measure.
dahdum 7y ago
I would expect compensation to rise substantially under this rule to account for the new risk of the position, from the Fortune 50 all the way down.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  I would expect businesses to split up. It's physically impossible to keep 100,000 people from ever committing crimes. (By comparison, that's a mid-sized city. How busy are the police forces in a mid-sized city on a typical day, and how many crimes go uncaught?) You'd likely see one CEO after another go to jail until there's nobody with an ego big enough to take the position, at which point the company splits up until it reaches manageable chunks. ...which may not be a bad thing. Lock up all the sociopaths and narcissists, and improve competition too!
  - dahdum 7y ago
    If we are going to start locking up people for not stopping others from committing crimes without their knowledge, why stop with CEO’s? How about parents of kids that commit felonies? Teachers that don’t stop bullying. Not a society I want to live in.
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      Those other cases don't generally involve the person incentivizing the other person to engage in illegal behavior and when it does they generally already face penalties under law. While there are some problems with the purposed law, then needs to be penalties for creating the incentives.
      - dahdum 7y ago
        Incentives basic as “not getting laid off” cause illegal behavior, so it seems nigh unworkable to me. In any event, it appears to be a rather fundamental change that should not be pursued lightly.
    - GFischer 7y ago
      I don´t know what they do in the U.S., but here in Uruguay the parents ARE responsible for kids that commit severe felonies (unless they´re old enough to be judged themselves). It´s not usually applied though.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
- doubleunplussed 7y ago
  I have no intuition for this. Compensation is already so stupendously high that I just can't imagine marginal dollars one way or the other, uniformly applied to all CEO positions, having any effect on a CEOs willingness to do their job at all. Maybe fewer, or different people would want to be CEOs if it came with this risk, but given that I have no clue what drives current compensation other than a zero-sum competition between companies for scarce abilities (what are you gonna do if the salary is not high enough, not be a CEO at all? Nothing comes close salarywise, so being a CEO at a lower salary should still be your best option), I wouldn't want to speculate about it. If it's just companies bidding over who gets the CEOs, then it's limited by how much they can pay and the size of the pool. And I just can't see the size of the pool changing if you increase the salary. There can't possibly be any dynamic range left at these levels. Its like: I'll pay you infinity dollars to do this. Yeah? Well that other guy will pay you infinity plus one! That's how it feels from down here on mean income. Maybe I lack perspective and a bigger yacht is more of an incentive than it seems.
- wang_li 7y ago
  This headline only applies to the largest 350 companies in the US. According to BLS data there are 200,000+ people in the US with the job title CEO and the average salary is around $180,000. EPI is constantly publishing updated versions of this report and beating the "CEOs are paid too much" drum like a wind up monkey.
  - corodra 7y ago
    Look at you for doing homework and having an independent mindset to find your own truths rather than blindly follow others... what's wrong with you? That's not allowed here. This is capitalism bad only allowed rhetoric.
    - heyoni 7y ago
      Or maybe we’re cutting down on cognitive overload because we can’t independently dig down into a rabbit hole each and every time we read an article. Also, none of what was said contradicts the notion that the wage gap is getting wider.
      - corodra 7y ago
        But the conversation makes it seems like all CEOs are the big bad boogey men out to eat your children's cookies when they're asleep. There are lots of cuntbag CEOs out there, don't get me wrong. But profiling is bad. There are plenty of small business c corps out there that have owners who really don't make all that much more than their employees.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SilasX 7y ago
  And/or the scale of companies to shrink dramatically to the point that the CEO is only 2-3 degrees away from any employee instead of 6+.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I think that would be a good outcome. We would be better off with many small companies.
    - anchpop 7y ago
      Why? Economies of scale can make things a lot cheaper
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        Sure. Up to the point where the big guys are stifling progress. I was around when the PC industry wasn’t dominated by MS and Apple and I much preferred having a lot of smaller companies producing innovative stuff. It was more chaotic and less Convenient but much more interesting and fun.
      - pitay 7y ago
        Nothing stopping those smaller companies coming to arrangements to keep those economies of scale.
agilebyte 7y ago
CEOs can be found criminally responsible currently. Counsel, teams of lawyers and in particular auditors are all there to shield them from that risk. Not sure anything would change.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  What I am talking about is not having any shield. If there is widespread illegal behavior in the company, the CEO goes to jail, period. It does not matter what their lawyers said, it does not matter what the auditors said. If it happens, they go to jail end of story. The buck stops with them.
  - Excel_Wizard 7y ago
    How widespread would the illegal activity have to be for the CEO to be at fault? Warren Buffett has said (roughly), if you have a city of 300,000 people, you have to expect that some of them will commit crimes, and you need police officers for this reason. You should expect the same thing for a company of 300,000 people.
    - behringer 7y ago
      I say start by getting rid of the corporate veil? Outlaw the institution of the corporation. All company owners are now personally liable for their company's debts. Most societal problems would be fixed. Progress might slow down, but is that a bad thing? We're on a collision course with global warming, so slowing down progress and making people personally liable for the environment might be a good thing.
      - nostrademons 7y ago
        You run into evolutionary game theory issues. The reason the world is dominated by corporate states today is because the existence of corporations - formal organizations shielded from legal liability, able to take on projects riskier than any individual would - helped them conquer the rest of the world. Native American tribes didn't have corporations. Pre-colonial India didn't have corporations. Imperial China didn't have corporations. In all cases these civilizations were subjugated through direct corporate influence, oftentimes because the corporate veil allowed institutions like the British East India Corporation or the American Railroads to commit crimes (like genocide) that would've been thoroughly illegal if perpetrated from one individual to another within the society. You'd likely end up with a temporary utopia within the society which gets shattered once another society (which embraces the competition, risk-taking, and technological progress afforded by corporations) decides that your utopia is looking awfully weak and has some nice goodies.
e1g 7y ago
We also should hold parents criminally responsible for their children's illegal behavior, at least until the kids move out. I think teachers must be fired if any of their students cheat or get disciplined. I also vote that every general and the president should get be jailed when a soldier commits a crime.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  I think the principal of the school where there is widespread cheating among students, should get fired. In addition, commanders are disciplined if their is widespread war crimes by the soldiers under their command. In the case of the commander, ignorance would not be a defense.
  - e1g 7y ago
    That's a great discount from "criminally responsible". Also, that is the current practice - managers and executives are judged and disciplined for failures of their staff (fraud, theft, CSR failures etc). These actions are not publicized because of optics, but the consequences are proportional to rank. You just don't see people complaining about this on Twitter, or going to the media with examples of consequences. Different rules.
- sucrose 7y ago
  If a student and teacher, parent and child, or a general/president and solider selfishly conspire for their own benefit, they should be dealt with.
- neogodless 7y ago
  There are reasons why this isn't a good analogy. You're talking about controlling human behavior with no alternative. In other words, as a parent or teacher, you do your best to teach and guide and give them direction and rules to follow, but they still might act outside of those boundaries. And these are children, who will try to be creative and go outside the lines, even if (and because!) it's against the rules. But when that happens, you can discipline, teach and talk. But you don't fire the student or your children. (You can, in extreme cases, expel a student from school. But you're even saying that any discipline should land on the teacher's shoulders!) A CEO is running an organization where everyone involved is in adult, likely vetted (interviews are really common), and if they make mistakes or choose to break the rules, it's perfectly OK to remove them from the organization entirely.
dannypgh 7y ago
Or it would force people to take draconian steps to hinder any investigation. Threatening to throw individuals in prison for profitable but undesirable behavior rarely seems to get much done. Consider the war on drugs, if you want. You can make felons out of a lot of people, but if the profit motive is strong enough, that's just going to encourage people to do more to not get caught.
- easyat 7y ago
  This argument can apply to any means to constrain profit motivation for the benefit of society. Equating punishing why collar criminal to mainly impoverished people selling or using drugs is a massive simplification It's similar to why tax a corporation? They will just move elsewhere. Also, a dubious assertion. Not all corporation will simply pack up and move out of an economy like the USA. Or why raise minimum wage? It'll cause an equal rise in inflation. There is no law stating the inflation will be exactly proportional to rise in wages.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Right, it's a pretty general argument. A good regulatory system can't just threaten to throw CEOs in jail whenever a bad thing happens and we think they should've stopped it. You have to keep track of the incentives you're establishing, and make sure they encourage people to do what you want and not do what you don't want.
    - easyat 7y ago
      Agreed. But to say that there shouldn't be more mechanisms to disincentive this behavior because they will simply be skirted is self-defeating. Why have any regulations?
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Agreed, but the point is that this particular mechanism doesn't disincentivize the fraud. The CEO of Wells Fargo has pretty much no power to stop an individual sales rep from lying on an account form, and neither that sales rep nor their manager is going to stop lying because we've threatened the CEO with jail time. The only thing the CEO could do to reduce their risk of going to jail is try and stop investigations from turning up evidence of fraud.
OrgNet 7y ago
genius
bilbo0s 7y ago
This is kind of the worst part about the discrepancy. When the proverbial excrement hits the air moving device, the poor guy at the bottom of the chain is the one held accountable even though he makes a fraction of what the CEO makes. Think about all those 737-MAX MCAS FAA certification documentats submitted by Boeing. I'd bet the vast majority of those are signed by some relatively low level software engineers. Maybe some QA leads and a few project manager types? So when the dust settles and the Feds start digging into who knew what when, guess who's names they're going to come across again, and again, and again. But the upper level guys probably run things so that they never have to personally sign off on anything like that, so they always have that buffer and plausible deniability.
- mjevans 7y ago
  The correct angle might be criminal negligence. It's not one or two actions of subordinates, but a trend that adds up over time or over individuals. Actual, independent, whistle-blower programs with real protections (possibly including a backing employment guarantee at similar market rate for life as a government worker in the same / similar field) might also help for providing an independent check on the system.
mulmen 7y ago
Would that make the average person’s life better than if their income had just grown at a reasonable rate? It’s unreasonable to expect one person to actually have the kind of accountability you seem to think CEOs are simply choosing not to exercise. I would rather workers just got paid a reasonable wage.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  One way it would make the average person's life better is that it would reduce the number of times they are forced to choose between illegal activity and their job. Think of the WellsFargo workers. They only way they could make their quota was to engage in fraud. Workers who did not engage in fraud lost their jobs. Think also about the Boeing engineers who, no doubt, were pressured from higher ups to sign off on faulty designs. If the higher ups knew that their personal freedom was on the line, they would not pressure workers to do illegal stuff. Right now, companies come up with incentives that reward illegal behavior which allows the higher ups to profit, while leaving the low-level workers with the criminal liability.
  - andrekandre 7y ago
    with that kind of compensation and power [1], wouldn’t those laws that hold them criminally liable not last long? i would expect legal lobbying to slowly eat away at it and we would be back where we started... [1] https://work.chron.com/average-income-ceo-fortune-500-company-5348.html https://work.chron.com/average-income-ceo-fortune-500-compan...
- travisfischer 7y ago
  Completely sincere question, how would you personally define a reasonable wage?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjevans 7y ago
    Given the absolute lack of context... actual socialism would be a "reasonable" wage. Everyone having everything they needed to live and be better as an individual. The natural birth right is to compete for such needs and to maim / kill if necessary to obtain them. No safety or protections. Possibly small tribal units to operate beyond the individual. A rational mind recognizes that the above leads to violence and associated negative outcomes. It also often poorly allocates resources and does not well adapt to the ability to engineer our environment for better outcomes. Wages are also often conflated with a belief that there isn't a relationship between the average purchasing power over a population and the pricing of goods for said population. Supply and demand curves from econ101 exist to describe why that isn't true. Thus another way of viewing wages, reasonable or not, is in terms of comparison among workers. The real question would be one of disparity between the have most and have least: how much more is one individual worth than another? Business expenses and such deducted beforehand, I couldn't even see Iron Man (Tony Stark) being "worth" more than about 100X what even the least worthy individual is; let alone a normal CEO. I find it extremely unlikely that normal worker wages have grown 100% since 1978 (or over any other timeframe) to at least keep parity with that measure...
bdcravens 7y ago
That sounds great, but if a CEO has that level of accountability, you better believe they will want some enforcement powers to ensure no one is doing anything illegal. "Pardon me, RcouF1uZ4gsC, it's time for your monthly scan of your computer and mobile device. Please provide all passwords to any services you login on those devices. Remember, your contract dictates that failure to comply results in immediate termination. Please take unpaid time off while we perform our scan."
- magashna 7y ago
  Is this unreasonable on a work computer? Any company with a well calibrated SIEM is already logging everything you do and firing off alerts when suspicious behavior is happening
- aqme28 7y ago
  You write this like it's a dystopia, but that has been a standard practice at every decently-sized company I've worked at.
- asavadatti 7y ago
  Does this not happen right now? If you have a company issued device you have no expectation of privacy on that device
  - distances 7y ago
    I do have. I expect my employer not to snoop on the files on my work laptop, nor unnecessarily read any emails I send with my work account. I'm not from the US so maybe that's grounds for the different expectations. And I'm not sure if my employer would actually be breaking any laws snooping on the laptop; I certainly hope so.
    - edmundsauto 7y ago
      I think that's a little unreasonable -- it's their laptop, and their work email account, not yours.
ASalazarMX 7y ago
This might sound too radical, but how about abolishing the concept of corporate personhood? Companies are more dictatorships than democracies, so the people calling the shots should be directly responsible for knowingly breaking the law. Granted, this will make forming companies a riskier proposition, but it would also contain the unethical traits of capitalism, as you can't order illegal actions and be shielded against the consequences.
refurb 7y ago
Even if they claim that they did not know, at their pay scale, it was their responsibility to know and thus they are criminally negligent. So if you had an employee who was secreting breaking the law, you'd put the CEO in jail?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think we definitely should look at the political situation in that company. Whatever I have read about Wells Fargo and beginning to see at the company I work there is a lot of pressure from the top to the point where the little guy is almost forced to break the rules. Yes there are bad employees but there is also bad culture that coverts good employees to bad employees.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Presumably, an investigation would be done first.
antoinevg 7y ago
No thank you, I don't want to have to choose between the two. I'd like to see an end to both overpaid CEO's and criminal activity.
joyeuse6701 7y ago
I can see this backfiring in the form of intense micromanagement.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
How would this be okay? You can kill the CEO with little repercussion to a large company. The CEO pay should be something like 2x the pay of an engineer. That's how much effort he actually contributes to the company. The true wealth and power of the company lies in the employees in aggregate. Also note the way a CEO acts is actually directly influenced by shareholders. They act that way so shareholders don't fire them. If you want to reign criminal behavior you actually have to target majority share holders and board members. Targeting the CEO creates conflicting sources of influence. Attack the source: Board members and shareholders.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
I can't say I agree. The old country ( former soviet satellite ) has pretty strong language for CEOs that basically says they are liable with their own fortunes. From your argument, it would flow that companies would be less likely to make.. unethical choices. There is no apparent disparity in that. What did change was an immediate push to ensure that any high execs own almost nothing.. on paper. People adapt so designing a system has to consider that. Edit: And execs typically design the system and have access to those designing framework. Golden rule applies.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I've thought a bit about the criminally responsible bit. I agree that it is important to punish bad actors, but we're missing (legislation/laws needed) to link the punishment to the actual perpetrator and a punishment that is a significant deterrent without putting a bigger cost on society than the crime itself (its expensive to lock people up for example). One thought was that we could create a punishment which is to 'zero out' someone. The way this would work is that the government would issue a new form of Treasury bill that had a 20 year maturity date. The duly tried and convicted felon would have all of their assets, foreign and domestic, seized. and converted into cash. That cash would then go into the treasury in exchange these T-bills, coupon value of $100K each, the discount rate being set at the time of sale to match 20 year "regular" T-bills. The felon would be left with $100K + what ever fraction of $100K was left over after converting their assets into $100K 20-year bonds. Now, if at any time in the next 20 years the conviction is overturned, the felon can redeem the bonds at their current redemption rate which would match the same rate as the 20 year T-bill. Getting all their money back. However, if the conviction stands for 20 years, the bonds would "expire" (this is the difference between regular T-bills) and they would lose all value, present or future. This scheme is an attempt to change the current model of 'spend a few years in a low security federal prison and be released to your millions when you are done'. It seems to me that if someone made $100M in their illegal scheme, and then gets convicted and fined $10M and have to spend 5 years in jail, they might consider that an Okay tradeoff for a $90M payday that is now untouchable.

pembrook 7y ago

This makes no sense. If you read Matt Levine, you know that literally everything a public company does can be considered securities fraud. It'd be impossible to run a public company if this were the case.

qqqwerty 7y ago
The OP is suggesting that CEO's face harsher penalties when criminal activity, significant enough to be investigated and prosecuted, is discovered. If 'everything is securities fraud', and those frauds are not worthy of an investigation currently, then those companies would not be impacted by the suggestion. But they would have an incentive to be more diligent, as a precautionary measure.

dahdum 7y ago

I would expect compensation to rise substantially under this rule to account for the new risk of the position, from the Fortune 50 all the way down.

nostrademons 7y ago
I would expect businesses to split up. It's physically impossible to keep 100,000 people from ever committing crimes. (By comparison, that's a mid-sized city. How busy are the police forces in a mid-sized city on a typical day, and how many crimes go uncaught?) You'd likely see one CEO after another go to jail until there's nobody with an ego big enough to take the position, at which point the company splits up until it reaches manageable chunks. ...which may not be a bad thing. Lock up all the sociopaths and narcissists, and improve competition too!
- dahdum 7y ago
  If we are going to start locking up people for not stopping others from committing crimes without their knowledge, why stop with CEO’s? How about parents of kids that commit felonies? Teachers that don’t stop bullying. Not a society I want to live in.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    Those other cases don't generally involve the person incentivizing the other person to engage in illegal behavior and when it does they generally already face penalties under law. While there are some problems with the purposed law, then needs to be penalties for creating the incentives.
    - dahdum 7y ago
      Incentives basic as “not getting laid off” cause illegal behavior, so it seems nigh unworkable to me. In any event, it appears to be a rather fundamental change that should not be pursued lightly.
  - GFischer 7y ago
    I don´t know what they do in the U.S., but here in Uruguay the parents ARE responsible for kids that commit severe felonies (unless they´re old enough to be judged themselves). It´s not usually applied though.
- Qwertystop 7y ago
doubleunplussed 7y ago
I have no intuition for this. Compensation is already so stupendously high that I just can't imagine marginal dollars one way or the other, uniformly applied to all CEO positions, having any effect on a CEOs willingness to do their job at all. Maybe fewer, or different people would want to be CEOs if it came with this risk, but given that I have no clue what drives current compensation other than a zero-sum competition between companies for scarce abilities (what are you gonna do if the salary is not high enough, not be a CEO at all? Nothing comes close salarywise, so being a CEO at a lower salary should still be your best option), I wouldn't want to speculate about it. If it's just companies bidding over who gets the CEOs, then it's limited by how much they can pay and the size of the pool. And I just can't see the size of the pool changing if you increase the salary. There can't possibly be any dynamic range left at these levels. Its like: I'll pay you infinity dollars to do this. Yeah? Well that other guy will pay you infinity plus one! That's how it feels from down here on mean income. Maybe I lack perspective and a bigger yacht is more of an incentive than it seems.
wang_li 7y ago
This headline only applies to the largest 350 companies in the US. According to BLS data there are 200,000+ people in the US with the job title CEO and the average salary is around $180,000. EPI is constantly publishing updated versions of this report and beating the "CEOs are paid too much" drum like a wind up monkey.
- corodra 7y ago
  Look at you for doing homework and having an independent mindset to find your own truths rather than blindly follow others... what's wrong with you? That's not allowed here. This is capitalism bad only allowed rhetoric.
  - heyoni 7y ago
    Or maybe we’re cutting down on cognitive overload because we can’t independently dig down into a rabbit hole each and every time we read an article. Also, none of what was said contradicts the notion that the wage gap is getting wider.
    - corodra 7y ago
      But the conversation makes it seems like all CEOs are the big bad boogey men out to eat your children's cookies when they're asleep. There are lots of cuntbag CEOs out there, don't get me wrong. But profiling is bad. There are plenty of small business c corps out there that have owners who really don't make all that much more than their employees.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SilasX 7y ago
And/or the scale of companies to shrink dramatically to the point that the CEO is only 2-3 degrees away from any employee instead of 6+.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think that would be a good outcome. We would be better off with many small companies.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    Why? Economies of scale can make things a lot cheaper
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      Sure. Up to the point where the big guys are stifling progress. I was around when the PC industry wasn’t dominated by MS and Apple and I much preferred having a lot of smaller companies producing innovative stuff. It was more chaotic and less Convenient but much more interesting and fun.
    - pitay 7y ago
      Nothing stopping those smaller companies coming to arrangements to keep those economies of scale.

agilebyte 7y ago

CEOs can be found criminally responsible currently. Counsel, teams of lawyers and in particular auditors are all there to shield them from that risk. Not sure anything would change.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
What I am talking about is not having any shield. If there is widespread illegal behavior in the company, the CEO goes to jail, period. It does not matter what their lawyers said, it does not matter what the auditors said. If it happens, they go to jail end of story. The buck stops with them.
- Excel_Wizard 7y ago
  How widespread would the illegal activity have to be for the CEO to be at fault? Warren Buffett has said (roughly), if you have a city of 300,000 people, you have to expect that some of them will commit crimes, and you need police officers for this reason. You should expect the same thing for a company of 300,000 people.
  - behringer 7y ago
    I say start by getting rid of the corporate veil? Outlaw the institution of the corporation. All company owners are now personally liable for their company's debts. Most societal problems would be fixed. Progress might slow down, but is that a bad thing? We're on a collision course with global warming, so slowing down progress and making people personally liable for the environment might be a good thing.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      You run into evolutionary game theory issues. The reason the world is dominated by corporate states today is because the existence of corporations - formal organizations shielded from legal liability, able to take on projects riskier than any individual would - helped them conquer the rest of the world. Native American tribes didn't have corporations. Pre-colonial India didn't have corporations. Imperial China didn't have corporations. In all cases these civilizations were subjugated through direct corporate influence, oftentimes because the corporate veil allowed institutions like the British East India Corporation or the American Railroads to commit crimes (like genocide) that would've been thoroughly illegal if perpetrated from one individual to another within the society. You'd likely end up with a temporary utopia within the society which gets shattered once another society (which embraces the competition, risk-taking, and technological progress afforded by corporations) decides that your utopia is looking awfully weak and has some nice goodies.

e1g 7y ago

We also should hold parents criminally responsible for their children's illegal behavior, at least until the kids move out. I think teachers must be fired if any of their students cheat or get disciplined. I also vote that every general and the president should get be jailed when a soldier commits a crime.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I think the principal of the school where there is widespread cheating among students, should get fired. In addition, commanders are disciplined if their is widespread war crimes by the soldiers under their command. In the case of the commander, ignorance would not be a defense.
- e1g 7y ago
  That's a great discount from "criminally responsible". Also, that is the current practice - managers and executives are judged and disciplined for failures of their staff (fraud, theft, CSR failures etc). These actions are not publicized because of optics, but the consequences are proportional to rank. You just don't see people complaining about this on Twitter, or going to the media with examples of consequences. Different rules.
sucrose 7y ago
If a student and teacher, parent and child, or a general/president and solider selfishly conspire for their own benefit, they should be dealt with.
neogodless 7y ago
There are reasons why this isn't a good analogy. You're talking about controlling human behavior with no alternative. In other words, as a parent or teacher, you do your best to teach and guide and give them direction and rules to follow, but they still might act outside of those boundaries. And these are children, who will try to be creative and go outside the lines, even if (and because!) it's against the rules. But when that happens, you can discipline, teach and talk. But you don't fire the student or your children. (You can, in extreme cases, expel a student from school. But you're even saying that any discipline should land on the teacher's shoulders!) A CEO is running an organization where everyone involved is in adult, likely vetted (interviews are really common), and if they make mistakes or choose to break the rules, it's perfectly OK to remove them from the organization entirely.

dannypgh 7y ago

Or it would force people to take draconian steps to hinder any investigation. Threatening to throw individuals in prison for profitable but undesirable behavior rarely seems to get much done. Consider the war on drugs, if you want. You can make felons out of a lot of people, but if the profit motive is strong enough, that's just going to encourage people to do more to not get caught.

easyat 7y ago
This argument can apply to any means to constrain profit motivation for the benefit of society. Equating punishing why collar criminal to mainly impoverished people selling or using drugs is a massive simplification It's similar to why tax a corporation? They will just move elsewhere. Also, a dubious assertion. Not all corporation will simply pack up and move out of an economy like the USA. Or why raise minimum wage? It'll cause an equal rise in inflation. There is no law stating the inflation will be exactly proportional to rise in wages.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Right, it's a pretty general argument. A good regulatory system can't just threaten to throw CEOs in jail whenever a bad thing happens and we think they should've stopped it. You have to keep track of the incentives you're establishing, and make sure they encourage people to do what you want and not do what you don't want.
  - easyat 7y ago
    Agreed. But to say that there shouldn't be more mechanisms to disincentive this behavior because they will simply be skirted is self-defeating. Why have any regulations?
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      Agreed, but the point is that this particular mechanism doesn't disincentivize the fraud. The CEO of Wells Fargo has pretty much no power to stop an individual sales rep from lying on an account form, and neither that sales rep nor their manager is going to stop lying because we've threatened the CEO with jail time. The only thing the CEO could do to reduce their risk of going to jail is try and stop investigations from turning up evidence of fraud.

OrgNet 7y ago

genius

bilbo0s 7y ago

This is kind of the worst part about the discrepancy. When the proverbial excrement hits the air moving device, the poor guy at the bottom of the chain is the one held accountable even though he makes a fraction of what the CEO makes. Think about all those 737-MAX MCAS FAA certification documentats submitted by Boeing. I'd bet the vast majority of those are signed by some relatively low level software engineers. Maybe some QA leads and a few project manager types? So when the dust settles and the Feds start digging into who knew what when, guess who's names they're going to come across again, and again, and again. But the upper level guys probably run things so that they never have to personally sign off on anything like that, so they always have that buffer and plausible deniability.

mjevans 7y ago
The correct angle might be criminal negligence. It's not one or two actions of subordinates, but a trend that adds up over time or over individuals. Actual, independent, whistle-blower programs with real protections (possibly including a backing employment guarantee at similar market rate for life as a government worker in the same / similar field) might also help for providing an independent check on the system.

mulmen 7y ago

Would that make the average person’s life better than if their income had just grown at a reasonable rate? It’s unreasonable to expect one person to actually have the kind of accountability you seem to think CEOs are simply choosing not to exercise. I would rather workers just got paid a reasonable wage.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
One way it would make the average person's life better is that it would reduce the number of times they are forced to choose between illegal activity and their job. Think of the WellsFargo workers. They only way they could make their quota was to engage in fraud. Workers who did not engage in fraud lost their jobs. Think also about the Boeing engineers who, no doubt, were pressured from higher ups to sign off on faulty designs. If the higher ups knew that their personal freedom was on the line, they would not pressure workers to do illegal stuff. Right now, companies come up with incentives that reward illegal behavior which allows the higher ups to profit, while leaving the low-level workers with the criminal liability.
- andrekandre 7y ago
  with that kind of compensation and power [1], wouldn’t those laws that hold them criminally liable not last long? i would expect legal lobbying to slowly eat away at it and we would be back where we started... [1] https://work.chron.com/average-income-ceo-fortune-500-company-5348.html https://work.chron.com/average-income-ceo-fortune-500-compan...
travisfischer 7y ago
Completely sincere question, how would you personally define a reasonable wage?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mjevans 7y ago
  Given the absolute lack of context... actual socialism would be a "reasonable" wage. Everyone having everything they needed to live and be better as an individual. The natural birth right is to compete for such needs and to maim / kill if necessary to obtain them. No safety or protections. Possibly small tribal units to operate beyond the individual. A rational mind recognizes that the above leads to violence and associated negative outcomes. It also often poorly allocates resources and does not well adapt to the ability to engineer our environment for better outcomes. Wages are also often conflated with a belief that there isn't a relationship between the average purchasing power over a population and the pricing of goods for said population. Supply and demand curves from econ101 exist to describe why that isn't true. Thus another way of viewing wages, reasonable or not, is in terms of comparison among workers. The real question would be one of disparity between the have most and have least: how much more is one individual worth than another? Business expenses and such deducted beforehand, I couldn't even see Iron Man (Tony Stark) being "worth" more than about 100X what even the least worthy individual is; let alone a normal CEO. I find it extremely unlikely that normal worker wages have grown 100% since 1978 (or over any other timeframe) to at least keep parity with that measure...

bdcravens 7y ago

That sounds great, but if a CEO has that level of accountability, you better believe they will want some enforcement powers to ensure no one is doing anything illegal. "Pardon me, RcouF1uZ4gsC, it's time for your monthly scan of your computer and mobile device. Please provide all passwords to any services you login on those devices. Remember, your contract dictates that failure to comply results in immediate termination. Please take unpaid time off while we perform our scan."

magashna 7y ago
Is this unreasonable on a work computer? Any company with a well calibrated SIEM is already logging everything you do and firing off alerts when suspicious behavior is happening
aqme28 7y ago
You write this like it's a dystopia, but that has been a standard practice at every decently-sized company I've worked at.
asavadatti 7y ago
Does this not happen right now? If you have a company issued device you have no expectation of privacy on that device
- distances 7y ago
  I do have. I expect my employer not to snoop on the files on my work laptop, nor unnecessarily read any emails I send with my work account. I'm not from the US so maybe that's grounds for the different expectations. And I'm not sure if my employer would actually be breaking any laws snooping on the laptop; I certainly hope so.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    I think that's a little unreasonable -- it's their laptop, and their work email account, not yours.

ASalazarMX 7y ago

This might sound too radical, but how about abolishing the concept of corporate personhood? Companies are more dictatorships than democracies, so the people calling the shots should be directly responsible for knowingly breaking the law. Granted, this will make forming companies a riskier proposition, but it would also contain the unethical traits of capitalism, as you can't order illegal actions and be shielded against the consequences.

refurb 7y ago

Even if they claim that they did not know, at their pay scale, it was their responsibility to know and thus they are criminally negligent. So if you had an employee who was secreting breaking the law, you'd put the CEO in jail?

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think we definitely should look at the political situation in that company. Whatever I have read about Wells Fargo and beginning to see at the company I work there is a lot of pressure from the top to the point where the little guy is almost forced to break the rules. Yes there are bad employees but there is also bad culture that coverts good employees to bad employees.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Presumably, an investigation would be done first.

antoinevg 7y ago

No thank you, I don't want to have to choose between the two. I'd like to see an end to both overpaid CEO's and criminal activity.

joyeuse6701 7y ago

I can see this backfiring in the form of intense micromanagement.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

How would this be okay? You can kill the CEO with little repercussion to a large company. The CEO pay should be something like 2x the pay of an engineer. That's how much effort he actually contributes to the company. The true wealth and power of the company lies in the employees in aggregate. Also note the way a CEO acts is actually directly influenced by shareholders. They act that way so shareholders don't fire them. If you want to reign criminal behavior you actually have to target majority share holders and board members. Targeting the CEO creates conflicting sources of influence. Attack the source: Board members and shareholders.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

I can't say I agree. The old country ( former soviet satellite ) has pretty strong language for CEOs that basically says they are liable with their own fortunes. From your argument, it would flow that companies would be less likely to make.. unethical choices. There is no apparent disparity in that. What did change was an immediate push to ensure that any high execs own almost nothing.. on paper. People adapt so designing a system has to consider that. Edit: And execs typically design the system and have access to those designing framework. Golden rule applies.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I've thought a bit about the criminally responsible bit. I agree that it is important to punish bad actors, but we're missing (legislation/laws needed) to link the punishment to the actual perpetrator and a punishment that is a significant deterrent without putting a bigger cost on society than the crime itself (its expensive to lock people up for example). One thought was that we could create a punishment which is to 'zero out' someone. The way this would work is that the government would issue a new form of Treasury bill that had a 20 year maturity date. The duly tried and convicted felon would have all of their assets, foreign and domestic, seized. and converted into cash. That cash would then go into the treasury in exchange these T-bills, coupon value of $100K each, the discount rate being set at the time of sale to match 20 year "regular" T-bills. The felon would be left with $100K + what ever fraction of $100K was left over after converting their assets into $100K 20-year bonds. Now, if at any time in the next 20 years the conviction is overturned, the felon can redeem the bonds at their current redemption rate which would match the same rate as the 20 year T-bill. Getting all their money back. However, if the conviction stands for 20 years, the bonds would "expire" (this is the difference between regular T-bills) and they would lose all value, present or future. This scheme is an attempt to change the current model of 'spend a few years in a low security federal prison and be released to your millions when you are done'. It seems to me that if someone made $100M in their illegal scheme, and then gets convicted and fined $10M and have to spend 5 years in jail, they might consider that an Okay tradeoff for a $90M payday that is now untouchable.