It's Math 101. CEOs compensation is typically tied to Market Caps of firms, while employees have fixed/sticky wages.
In the 'Yore' It took a great deal of time for any firm to add $1 Billion value to their Market Cap. So, naturally CEOs compensation grew slowly.
In the modern era, companies can add a Trillion Market Cap in a year. So, naturally CEO's growth rate will rapidly grow.
A lot of phenomenon in this world can be explained if you apply Mathematical concepts and natural laws instead of resorting to conspiracy, billionaire-hate and anything lately pushed by mainstream media
> It's Math 101. CEOs compensation is typically tied to Market Caps of firms, while employees have fixed/sticky wages.
It NOT Math 101. You're making some assertions that really don't stand up to even basic Econ 101 theory of markets. Why shouldn't other employee compensation be tied to market cap of firms (relative to the number of employees) and CEO compensation be fixed/sticky wages?
The forces driving CEO wages should be no different than other employee wages. They should be driven by the net value they can provide for a company. (Seriously, if you're going to tie anything to the market cap of a firm, it should be more CFO/comptroller type roles, not CEO... but you don't see the accounting team being compensated more just because the company has a bigger budget.) It's not unreasonable that companies might think that CEOs provide more value than their other employees (not always true, but not an unsurprising perspective), but you'd have a hell of a time convincing me that CEO performance has improved 1460% in the last 50 years.
Indeed, for the most part the job hasn't become harder, nor have the criteria become more stringent. You go back 50+ years ago, and you actually had a more difficult job because a company needed to manage far more employees to achieve the same economic value. If you can get so much more economic value out of fewer employees, it should follow that the individual employees should be valued, if anything, more relative to the CEO.
Sure, absent other factors, if a company is able to produce more economic value with fewer employees, that increases the value of the CEO... but it also increases the value of most, if not all, of the employees as well, and arguably it increases their value proportionately more than the CEO's.
> while employees have fixed/sticky wages.
You have to ask yourself why it works that way.
If employee productivity increases (as measured by ARPE), it stands to reason that employee compensation would grow proportionately (or at least near proportionately... you would expect some of the increased productivity to be siphoned off into profits) with it. Instead, the CW is that CEO pay should increase disproportionately to employee productivity increases, and employee wages should stay stagnant... because against all reason, we attribute any productivity growth to the CEOs.
> A lot of phenomenon in this world can be explained if you apply Mathematical concepts and natural laws instead of resorting to conspiracy, billionaire-hate and anything lately pushed by mainstream media.
You can rationalize anything with; mathematical models are abstract, so it's all about how you map those models to the real world.
I'm not trying to suggest there's any kind of conspiracy, nor am I engaging in "billionaire-hate" (and let's be real, billionaire CEOs are, for the most part, owner-CEOs, not your typical hired-gun CEO).
What I am trying to suggest is that there might be flaws in the systemic structures we have for compensation and attribution. No conspiracy necessary.
In the 'Yore' It took a great deal of time for any firm to add $1 Billion value to their Market Cap. So, naturally CEOs compensation grew slowly.
In the modern era, companies can add a Trillion Market Cap in a year. So, naturally CEO's growth rate will rapidly grow.
A lot of phenomenon in this world can be explained if you apply Mathematical concepts and natural laws instead of resorting to conspiracy, billionaire-hate and anything lately pushed by mainstream media