@LouisIngenthron "economically worth" is never a fact in the world. value is a human construct, turtles all the way down. it depends upon your, um, values.

mainstream economic does not even pretend people are paid what they are "worth". just as water is worth more than diamonds under any use metric, but also much cheaper, a person can be valuable for scarcity. it doesn't matter how many jobs the robots you maintain automate, if lots of other people can maintain them. 1/

@LouisIngenthron people who are "responsible for maintaining hundreds of thousands of jobs (i.e. chairpeople of huge companies)" like to claim they have extremely scarce and valuable talents that merit extraordinary pay. but at two different levels, we should be skeptical. 2/

@LouisIngenthron first, firms and boards are clearly unable to distinguish between talented chief executives and poor ones. the ones who run firms into the ground are eagerly recruited and make huge salaries before they do. *ex post*, we might identify "talent" from the successes. but it's impossible to distinguish between talent and luck in the *ex post* distribution. 3/

@LouisIngenthron the question then becomes what is the minimum level of compensation required to get as-good-as-we-can-tell people to take these jobs? obviously, it is much, much lower than actual CEO comp, or would be if there weren't the high comparables they springboard from. if the top social comp in existence were 20x the minimum, would sufficiently talented people really just opt out? we have some evidence from the midcentury experience the answer is no. 4/

@LouisIngenthron at a deeper level, it's a mistake to imagine that maintaining 100,000 jobs in big firms is socially necessary to those 100,000 people. the question of full employment is conceptually and empirically distinct from the scale of the largest firms. right now we are near full-employment, but very few of our contemporary bigs employ at the scale of midcentury industrial firms. 5/

@LouisIngenthron we could have a full-employment economy made up only of small and medium-sized firms. there are questions of technical economies of scale, there may be things that huge is necessary for. but it's not employment. being a "job creator" for hundreds of thousands is arguably lots less desirable than having lots of job creators for hundreds. /fin

@LouisIngenthron (all of that said, the actual policy recommendation I typically support is yours! 100x from minimum to maximum. not because i believe that is somehow "right", but because a 100x collar would be a *huge* improvement to the *status quo* without being as disruptive of present arrangements of insisting on a much tighter compression of incomes. whatever ethical case you might make for a tighter compression, getting to 100x would be huge, and we'd know more after getting there.)