I think one thing that this pandemic is teaching us is that most people's jobs do jack shit to maintain the basic needs of society, and the ones with important jobs are often paid the least.
> the ones with important jobs are often paid the least.
that's the wrong way to think about it, and also a misunderstanding of economics.
If a teacher is paid the way a CEO is paid, there won't be enough money for very many teachers. You'd find it hard to afford a teacher for your kids, let alone free education.
A doctor, back in the middle ages, is only affordable to the nobility. These days, doctors are still quite highly paid (too high imho), and that is one reason why medical services are expensive.
Imagine if you associate the "importance" of a resource with its price. Water would cost more than diamonds and gold! Water is needed for sustaining life - you die without it. Therefore, in theory, it's so important that you end up paying infinity amount of money to have it, under your system!
The fact that we have water so cheap (literally 0.000001 cent per cup), is a good outcome. Everybody can afford water.
You are thinking about it wrongly. We should pay the CEO the same as the teacher. Managing a bunch of adults can't possibly be harder than teaching children. Education is an actual investment. Bullshit inc not so much.
> The owners of the company do, and it's paid out of the owners' pocket.
This is not true for publicly traded companies - where the board (consisting mostly executives at other companies) determines compensation on behalf of the owners
The board members operate only at the pleasure of the shareholders, so the shareholders ultimately determine CEO pay and are the ones who are paying it. Shareholders can (and often do) sell their stock the moment they don't like what the board and CEO are doing.
I'm sorry, I should have explained what seems so obvious to me. Let me try put it more sensible...
We have a finite amount of labor and a finite amount of resources available to us.
The thing our governments lack since the days of lords and god kings is direction. This is necessary since a group of people poorly working together isn't smarter than the smartest person in that group.
We all do stupid shit at times, if a lot of people decide to support the same stupid thing it is entirely possible to dedicate all time and resources to throwing virgins in the volcano, smoking opium or borrow money in stead of printing it. Who knows, someone might create the ultimate video game, we could retool our entire civilization to play the game non stop.
A [proverbial] god king would have other priorities, there might be a war coming with the neighboring country, there might be regular floods, there might be an insect plague, there might be a disease or the food might be running out.
We have distributed wealth recklessly (to put it blunt) and ended up with millions of little emperors who pay their little generals whatever they like. They are constantly at war with the next little empire.
The plague or the flood simply become economic developments that one can leverage for ones advantage. What is left of our government is a vending machine that one can use as a weapon to do whatever each little empire is willing to pay for.
I should mention we've made a ton of technological progress with this role playing game. It might just be that we've created the ultimate game already and that everyone is playing it. If so I'd have to argue we have one shitty dungeon master. The adventures planned out for most of us are not very interesting. Most of us are simply chasing the carrot on the stick. The heroes are not gaining as much experience points as they could, they are not learning as many new skills and abilities as they could. We can do better and we know it.
Say you are in charge for sake of argument. The orc's are getting ready to attack from the east, the goblins from the west but all your population cares about is opium. Would you dedicate resources to making swords and training or would you give the CEO of Opium inc in his competitive struggle with Meth corp the 10 000 men he wants for a promotional parade? The people might be enraged. If we make swords who will care for the poppy fields??
> Anyone is free to start a corporation
Indeed, I could create a product triggering superior production of endorphins. I could win a large market share and then present myself as if a philanthropist on a mission to help humanity with its struggles. I could prove it by moving funds into a non profit organization that might not do anything by design or struggle hard not accomplishing anything.
It's almost funny, the real needs retooled into a vehicle for public relations. If you play enough candy crush we will be sure to defeat the orc's.
> We have a finite amount of labor and a finite amount of resources available to us.
There is an infinite amount of labor available - because of improvements in efficiency. The manpower required to make a shirt has declined by something like 99% in the last 200 years. For growing food has dropped a similar amount. And on and on.
Resources are infinite because they can always be re-used and re-purposed for other things. For example, despite everyone eating chicken and ham, there is no looming shortage of chickens or pigs, because people figured out how to raise them efficiently.
Certainly, we live in interesting times. The capabilities are all there, what is left of the puzzle is tying it all together.
Gradually manpower to make a shirt has declined by 99%. It happened gradually so we continue to have more garment workers than needed. This is driving down salaries and it removes job security which again improves productivity.
I've seen stuff from up close that was much to ridiculous and I live in the Netherlands. I take all kinds of weird jobs just to see what things are like.
The latest trend is to reduce the work week from 5 to 2-3 days and the work day from 8 to 4-5 hours. That way you can make people work at insane speed. (Speed no one could work at for 40 hours)
In one such job (which wasn't the most idiotic example at all) a group of 5 people produced half a million boxes of cookies in a day. The conveyor belt moved so fast one couldn't scratch himself. After taxes I got 35 euro per day.
I kept getting back to the same thought. Do I need cookies to cost 99 cents per box? How terrible would it be if they cost 1 euro? Would we raise our nose and push the shopping cart ahead thinking "how dare they ask this much money for cookies?!" When shopping I couldn't care less if it costs 99 cents or 1 euro. I'm not saying we should pay people 1000 euro per day. I'm saying the customer certainly doesn't care if prices go up by that much. Only the Joneses would cry about it. They would demand salaries to go down to the appropriate 35 euro in a country where rent is 800. You'll just have to work 8 weeks to pay for it, you figure it out! You should have paid more attention in school then someone else would have had to package the cookies!
I can see how that line of reasoning works on an individual level and ill certainly make it work for me myself and I. I don't consider the societal puzzle solved like that.
On the second day I asked a manager if I could take a box of cookies. He couldn't look at me, he looked at the floor, then at the wall, then at the ceiling, then back at the wall. After 10 long seconds of silence he said, no not today sorry.
It took me days to figure out what thoughts were behind that expression, it was a simple yes/no question in my book... Then it struck me! The legal limit of gifts for employees (which includes product) is 1% of the salary! Having worked only 2 days there was no room to gift me the 99 cent pack of cookies.
At the end of the 3rd work day I found the manager at the exit. He proudly pointed out a pallet of test product. 1 box per person! He said!
Since I take such jobs somewhat as a corporate spy I had already learned that those boxes will be unpacked and the cookies will be sold as pig food.
Reading the expressions on his face this charade was much more painful for the manager than the employees.
The rules for taking cookies home were much less strictly enforced when people worked full time. No inspector would have considered it paying salary in cookies.
For the 4th time they are building a whole new factory now. I'm sure they will ramp up production to at least a million boxes per day. 3 out of the 5 jobs can be automated easily.
1 cent extra would then allow us to pay 5000 euro per day. Imagine how angry people would get?
Garment workers:
https://sustainablebrands.com/read/marketing-and-comms/garme...
"On average, they worked 60 hours a week and earned an hourly rate of 28 taka (the equivalent of $0.95 in purchasing power parity). They earned less than the minimum hourly wage 64 percent of the time and there was significant evidence to suggest that the more they worked, the less they earned."
forget ppp, 28 taka is $0.33
I'm simply suggesting we should build that world you portray rather than pretend it already exists.
