Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!pyramid!prls!philabs!gcm!dc From: dc@gcm (Dave Caswell) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: lotus chairman makes 26 million Message-ID: <456@white.gcm> Date: 7 May 88 07:42:47 GMT References: <9160@cisunx.UUCP> <1801@uhccux.UUCP> <807@netxcom.UUCP> <5079@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Reply-To: dc@white.UUCP (Dave Caswell) Organization: Greenwich Capital Markets, Greenwich, CT Lines: 40 In article <5079@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers) writes: .If Lotus fired their chairman tomorrow, they would still be in .business in a year. If they fired their engineers, they would be out That is not the argument. The argument would have to be put 500 engineers in a room and see if a large successful company pops up. Or is the success really the result of a few peoples foresight and of course the cooperation of many other people. .of business very soon. This seems to be one of the many cases where Engineers are 600,000 a dozen but people who can build large successful companies are very rare. .corporate salaries are not explainable by assuming a free market in .equilibrium. Of course, Lotus collects monopoly rents on its products, The high wages aren't because no one else has the product they are because no one else(or hardly anyone) has the wisdom to lead a company to such success. .due to time of introduction, copyright, and other factors, which allows Other factors such as money invested in research, advertising, having the best product etc. .them to pay their chairman a vast amount too much, instead of just a .lot more than he deserves. . .However, just because this guy is making 26M doesn't mean we should .steal from Lotus. Instead, we should be trying to find out why .executives in Lotus and many other firms are allowed to steal from .consumers and employees, and find a way to prevent it. It was probably somebody at the chairman level who decided to go ahead and spend the money to go ahead with the product in the first place. It was not obvious that spending the millions of dollars it cost to develop 1-2-3 was the right thing to do. Lotus is a publicly held company. I don't understand the reference from stealing. Do you really think that if the chairman died in a car accident tommorow and a successor could not be found that everyone's salary would increase? Would dividends go up?