Behind the Wall Street Protest

One job might be 10 times harder than another job. Nobody's job is 350 times harder than anything.

A career with enough star power to get 350x the base salary is a career that doesn't have a lot of earning years in it. You spend your twenties in graduate school. You spend your thirties working your way up. You get a good salary in your forties and hit the big time in your fifties and really only make that for three or four years of the Big Time contract. Only a handful of people are stars like that.

Sort of like basketball players.

The reason they get that sort of money is because of a bidding war: one person is in great demand and their unique (or nearly unique) skillset and rolodex is what is being requested. No other substitute will do, because no one else has spent the past thirty years grooming for this one job.

You know who determines whether a CEO is worth that money? The board of directors, who represent the owners. If the OWNERS of the company paying the salary are okay with it, why would you object?

This is a bit of a trope. There are only 500 Fortune 500 companies. Most CEOs are not stars. They make a couple hundred thousand, yes, but they were in graduate school about the same length of time as doctors. They are responsible for hundreds or perhaps thousands of people's jobs. Yes, their job is 350 times harder that a machine operators, where the machine operator shows up and presses a button and concern and responsibility never wrinkle their brow, whereas the CEO has responsibility 350 days in the year.

What makes someone's labor valuable is an interesting question. In the most fundamental element it has to do with a person's ability to transform energy into something someone else wants to buy. A knowledge worker consumed a lot of energy to get their brain trained: years of growing and eating and being heated and cooled waiting until the Problem they were Trained To Solve comes along. Another person might have less of a time/energy/life investment in their labor and generally be replaceable by anyone who ate breakfast this morning.

We've been changing how we transform energy quite a lot in the past two centuries. Harnessing extracted hydrocarbons allowed us to transform a LOT of energy. A lot a lot. Our society grew rich burning coal then oil then gas. We also extracted quite a lot of other stored up wealth: depletable resources like metals and renewable resources like timber and fish that weren't stewarded well.

Now we're growing rich with our brains. Well, some of us. And it's not leaving a lot of choices for those who don't work like that.

But, yeah, I can see how someone's brain could be worth 350x more than someone's brute labor.