[LI] Power, productivity, & wealth (2 items)

Two items posted to LinkedIn, which highlight incongruities in wealth and income, and their relative relationships to power and productivity.

While your salary stays the same, CEOs keep getting raises,” by Eillie Anzilotti, Fast Company, 16 Aug 2018 (posted August 2018)

Hmmm…

  • “CEO compensation rose by 979 percent” – “far faster than stock prices or corporate profits.”
  • “308 percent growth of wages for the very highest earners”
  • “11.2 percent growth in the typical worker’s compensation” while “worker productivity has increased by 77%”
  • “CEOs are outearning regular workers by a whopping 312 to 1”
  • “CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because they are more productive or have special talents or more education”

Why the distribution of wealth has more to do with power than productivity,” by Laurie Macfarlane, Medium.com, 11 Oct 2018 (posted October 2018)

This interesting article had me thinking again about institutional economics. It caught my eye as it discusses the fourth of 4 interrelated aspects of the economy that I think will be transformed in the wake of intelligent automation and related changes: work, jobs, income, and wealth.

The focus of this article however is how we have and currently do calculate wealth & facilitate its accumulation. Among the conclusions:

  1. “seemingly objective metrics often have ideological assumptions baked into them”
  2. “paper wealth has in many places become decoupled from productive capacity, and … conflating the two can be highly misleading”
  3. distribution of wealth is not as tied to production as we might like to think.

Other blogs > LinkedIn > LinkedIn articles & posts, 2018 (Jul–Dec)

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