I’ve been thinking about this position today and I don’t see how it makes any sense. Look: would a 10 million dollar salary really induce you to work 10 times harder than a 1 million dollar salary? What about 100 million- would you be working 4000 hours a week instead of 40? You’re going to spend all that money on one person and expect to get your moneys worth? No. Upper executives get that kind of money because they can, not because it makes sense.
Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?
I think you are in denial about human nature if you think that money is not a motivating factor for many (most?) capable professionals, and bringing the question of fairness into it and the fact that rewards at the higher levels are exponentially out of whack does not affect this initial point. To flip it around would be to say that things are so unfair and people are only taking the money because they can, not because that what really motivates them, so let's make all salaries the same because that won't affect peoples' choices. I have some knowledge of the dental profession through my partner. Her opinion is that money is the main motivating factor for entry into the profession in the UK, with altruistic concerns far behind. If one accepts this as having even some element of truth (and there's no small amount of evidence of rich, showy dentists on Instagram etc.) do you really still believe that altering the incentive will not affect behaviour? Qualifying as a dentist is hard. Becoming an expert on root canals is harder. People do not do it out of the goodness of their heart, or for social recognition of their career success alone. Material rewards are an essential component of the motivation.
There are many things that motivate people, money being one of them. I never said it wasn't a motivation. But a 2 dollars an hour raise could motivate a lot of people and an extra million for some CEO makes a marginal if any difference. There's no logical line you can trace from "money motivates people to do hard things" straight to "therefore all the money should be in the hands of a tiny number of people". That doesn't logically follow. There has to be balance. You have to look at what brings the maximum benefit to the most people. My point is that currently the people in power don't care whether things are out of balance, so long as they are the ones who benefit. If we have to make sacrifices to safe the world, cutting pay for the top 1% will not affect their motivation to work by very much. They're still going to be making more than the rest of us.
Look: if you’re the ceo of a corporation you can basically set your own paycheck. To suggest that these guys are diligently going over data, studying the best pay structure to attract talent, and so forth is totally naive. For one thing, none of these guys are very good at math. At the end of the day, trying to set your pay structure to grow the company is really hard. Cutting everyone’s pay to give yourself a raise is really easy. These are people whose parents paid for them to get into Harvard, they played golf with the right people to get into upper management they’ve always thought of themselves as above and separate from the common people who they hold in utter contempt- you’re not going to see very ethical behavior from someone like that. No tears will be shed for them if we have to bring a little balance back to society in order to save it.
Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?