I am starting a new job next year.
I'll be making as much money as a Kentucky coal miner fresh out of high school. However, if I reflect upon this, it makes sense. I consider the cost of living in the US. I consider the occupational risk of mining: health (black lung), accidents, etc. All these things result in roughly the same salary.
I've had a liberal education and a carefree life pursuing research into life's meaning at a molecular level. I should be paid a premium for that advance knowledge. However, that premium is about the same as the premium given to coal miners for their occupational risk (or should miners be paid more?!). Let's take a look at what we mean by premium and what exactly we are paying for.
On average, a coal miner, me and a CEO of some startup cloud company, are biological the same machine. This means a sophisticated organic locomotion chassis on which an advanced neural network is mounted. It has been argued that the advanced neural network mounted on the average CEO chassis is better at making complex decision regarding an ever changing community network than me or the coal miner.
I disagree. CEOs on average don't make better decisions than a Kentucky coal miner. If a CEO or a coal miner were given ownership of a company, on average, over time with multiple trials over many companies, we would see that both perform about the same in regard to the success of the company. Of course we can't run this experiment, and in the real world with all that money the CEO's voice is louder and people are evolutionarily conditioned to believe the louder speaker. He is shouting because of some imminent danger coming to eat us! But in reality he is shouting to hide the fact that his decision making isn't better than you or me.
This doesn't mean you or I can go out today to become a CEO, or that we would be successful at it if given only one shot. But if given the opportunity and observed over multiple companies you would see that our success rate would be about the same as any current CEO.
If my hypothesis is correct, then we have to ask why we pay CEO such a high premium. This premium is specifically for their decision making ability. Isn't it? Or are we paying for the social network that they have developed over time? The premium on the social network should be high, but if that is where the real value is, then we should acknowledge this fact!
And when we talk about increasing the opportunities of all Americans, what we should be talking about is increasing access of Americans to these social networks. The old social networks were difficult to open up. They tend to be closed and clique-ish. The new networks are much more open. Let's keep it that way.
Just my 2.3 cents.
-J
I'll be making as much money as a Kentucky coal miner fresh out of high school. However, if I reflect upon this, it makes sense. I consider the cost of living in the US. I consider the occupational risk of mining: health (black lung), accidents, etc. All these things result in roughly the same salary.
I've had a liberal education and a carefree life pursuing research into life's meaning at a molecular level. I should be paid a premium for that advance knowledge. However, that premium is about the same as the premium given to coal miners for their occupational risk (or should miners be paid more?!). Let's take a look at what we mean by premium and what exactly we are paying for.
On average, a coal miner, me and a CEO of some startup cloud company, are biological the same machine. This means a sophisticated organic locomotion chassis on which an advanced neural network is mounted. It has been argued that the advanced neural network mounted on the average CEO chassis is better at making complex decision regarding an ever changing community network than me or the coal miner.
I disagree. CEOs on average don't make better decisions than a Kentucky coal miner. If a CEO or a coal miner were given ownership of a company, on average, over time with multiple trials over many companies, we would see that both perform about the same in regard to the success of the company. Of course we can't run this experiment, and in the real world with all that money the CEO's voice is louder and people are evolutionarily conditioned to believe the louder speaker. He is shouting because of some imminent danger coming to eat us! But in reality he is shouting to hide the fact that his decision making isn't better than you or me.
This doesn't mean you or I can go out today to become a CEO, or that we would be successful at it if given only one shot. But if given the opportunity and observed over multiple companies you would see that our success rate would be about the same as any current CEO.
If my hypothesis is correct, then we have to ask why we pay CEO such a high premium. This premium is specifically for their decision making ability. Isn't it? Or are we paying for the social network that they have developed over time? The premium on the social network should be high, but if that is where the real value is, then we should acknowledge this fact!
And when we talk about increasing the opportunities of all Americans, what we should be talking about is increasing access of Americans to these social networks. The old social networks were difficult to open up. They tend to be closed and clique-ish. The new networks are much more open. Let's keep it that way.
Just my 2.3 cents.
-J
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