I mean there are reasons. The debate is if they're good reasons and what impact they have on the rest of the company and society as a whole. Looking at medians

I mean there are reasons. The debate is if they're good reasons and what impact they have on the rest of the company and society as a whole. Looking at medians and averages isn't the same thing as looking at extrema, and discarding those extrema is harmful to the data set when you can try and infer things about those extremes and how they impact the data set. Every person working on data eventually has to deal with this. When it comes to executive compensation the question isn't if it's a market reality or not. It obviously is. The question is if those market realities are beneficial to everyone else impacted by the market, and many would argue otherwise. Yes, golden parachutes and lucrative salaries/equity options are par for the course for fortune 1k companies. But how do those packages influence incentives? Are they encouraging, even creating positive feedback loops for short term incentives that cause inefficiencies in our companies? Are they a symptom or source of greater issues relating to long term health of our labor markets for average workers? I don't know, but it's worth investigation.