Paywalled but overall I’ve come to the conclusion that executive pay isn’t as insane as it seems. Like yeah okay there are outliers that are insane, but it’s actually a super difficult role to hire for, and certainly not a role AI can replace soon. It involves:

• high levels of creativity
• good taste and sound judgement
• a ton of politics and emotional intelligence
• mental stability and reliability
• a lot of intangible skills that are hard to survey
• connections & networking
• often unique and original views of the world
• organizational skills and high level problem solving

These aren’t skills to be taken lightly and they take years to develop, to be a good manager & bear responsibility for the lives of many employees. If AI made proposals, someone still has to actually judge which ideas to pursue, so you can’t really get rid of the job. Maybe you could reduce the amount of executives. But when a company has leadership that’s actually coherent and works, employees like them, it’s a goldmine that needs to be protected by the owners

Soo…like a general. How much does a general make?

Hard to say. I mean, the easy answer is only 10x a soldier in America. But they also get free housing, food, varied benefits & bonuses – and retired generals often make millions via their influence and power. But yeah they have salary caps and somehow the whole system still works pretty well

Wow, 10x employee salary seems to work well. I wonder why we need the 300-300,000x we’re seeing these days.

So good of you to acknowledge that your whole argument is undone by a simple question.

I wouldn’t go that far