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His closing comment might be one approach: force upper management to make a substantial, long-term investment in the company. An alternate approach would be re

His closing comment might be one approach: force upper management to make a substantial, long-term investment in the company. An alternate approach would be regulation: outlawing outsized compensation. If the top dog really did only earn 50x the janitor's salary, we could eliminate an entire class of parasite. A third approach would require cultural change. Regard managers as necessary but low-status. The people doing the actual work of the company should be held in higher regard - and earn more - than the paper shufflers.

seer 3y ago
The Mars trilogy offered a few very interesting ideas of economics. Since its a new place people are free to experiment with newer more radical power structures and economic approaches. What the author proposed and explored was a mandatory investment the compony you work for. E.g there are no employees at all just shareholders, and the minimum share you can have is regulated, thus limiting the size and structure of any organization. To be “employed” you have to buy into the company. Since you have advance automation in the universe of the books it seemed actually possible. All fascinating ideas, their implications, upsides and downsides were explored in the trilogy. And I’ve wondered since, can this be a solution to a lot of our current woes, with automation looming as a potential societal issue as well?
fallingknife 3y ago
How can you outlaw paying more than 50x to a CEO? Aside from the blatant government overreach, how would you even make it work? What if the equity ends up being worth more than that? If you solve that by not paying in equity, but only cash, now you have an even bigger incentive alignment problem.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >How can you outlaw paying more than 50x to a CEO? Through congress? There's nothing in the constitution against wages at all. >What if the equity ends up being worth more than that? If you solve that by not paying in equity, but only cash, now you have an even bigger incentive alignment problem. These people spend years undermining the working class and finding all sort of financial loopholes, I'm sure they can take non-cash benefits into account when drafting such a law. I don't think they will actually do so, but it's far from the realm of impossibility. e.g. for equity: you set a similar cap on RSUs and require all full time employees to get a certain amount. a CEO can hold no more than X times the amount of RSUs as your lowest paid employee and a portion of gains in RSUs are pooled into some other system to distribute per year as an end of year bonus (remember when that was the norm?). It's not perfect and I see two obvious holes here (contractors and part time workers), but this is from 5 minutes of brainstorming from a non-economics expert.
- NLips 3y ago
  The lowest paid employees get no less than 1/50th of the CEO’s allocation.

seer 3y ago

The Mars trilogy offered a few very interesting ideas of economics. Since its a new place people are free to experiment with newer more radical power structures and economic approaches. What the author proposed and explored was a mandatory investment the compony you work for. E.g there are no employees at all just shareholders, and the minimum share you can have is regulated, thus limiting the size and structure of any organization. To be “employed” you have to buy into the company. Since you have advance automation in the universe of the books it seemed actually possible. All fascinating ideas, their implications, upsides and downsides were explored in the trilogy. And I’ve wondered since, can this be a solution to a lot of our current woes, with automation looming as a potential societal issue as well?

fallingknife 3y ago

How can you outlaw paying more than 50x to a CEO? Aside from the blatant government overreach, how would you even make it work? What if the equity ends up being worth more than that? If you solve that by not paying in equity, but only cash, now you have an even bigger incentive alignment problem.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>How can you outlaw paying more than 50x to a CEO? Through congress? There's nothing in the constitution against wages at all. >What if the equity ends up being worth more than that? If you solve that by not paying in equity, but only cash, now you have an even bigger incentive alignment problem. These people spend years undermining the working class and finding all sort of financial loopholes, I'm sure they can take non-cash benefits into account when drafting such a law. I don't think they will actually do so, but it's far from the realm of impossibility. e.g. for equity: you set a similar cap on RSUs and require all full time employees to get a certain amount. a CEO can hold no more than X times the amount of RSUs as your lowest paid employee and a portion of gains in RSUs are pooled into some other system to distribute per year as an end of year bonus (remember when that was the norm?). It's not perfect and I see two obvious holes here (contractors and part time workers), but this is from 5 minutes of brainstorming from a non-economics expert.
NLips 3y ago
The lowest paid employees get no less than 1/50th of the CEO’s allocation.