Wow. That's . . . odd.

Someone on my friends list was discussing how they were upset by the idea of Congress capping CEO salaries. Fair enough. Someone made the comment that "it's like they don't even know why CEO salaries are as high as they are."

I commented that I don't actually understand why, either -- why are they that high? (I understand the historical reasons: as CEO salaries began to skyrocket in the early Eighties, an attempt to shame corporations into getting their salaries back into historical norms was made, by investigating and publishing said salaries. Which had the opposite effect: it became a dicksizing contest to pay one's CEO more than anyone else, and CEO salaries went up by ANOTHER order of magnitude. What I don't understand is the economic reason.)

The person said that it was to attract the best CEOs.

I said that there's no correlation between CEO compensation and CEO performance.

They said that it's hard to quantify CEO performance, because someone could do really brilliantly, but, for circumstances outside their control, still lose billions in a quarter.

I said, okay, there's no demonstrable correlation.

They said, c'mon, not all things that are demonstrable are quantifiable.

I said, look -- Sam's Club, BJ's, and Costco are in the same market segment. Sam's Club is way behind the other two, BJ's is in second place, but Costco is the market leader. Their CEO makes $100,000 a year. And I asked him if he could point to an industry in which the industry leaders had the highest paid CEOs.

He said, and I got this through comment notification, " in short, you're not here to discuss fundamental principles." and defriended me so that I can no longer see or comment on the post.

. . . the weird thing is that, to me, actually looking at real-world data is kind of PART of discussing fundamental principles. I thought that starting from dogma, working outward, and deciding that THAT was reality, without actually CONSIDERING reality went out of fashion when people noticed that Aristotle had been wrong about the number of teeth that women had.

One cool thing that fandom has taught me . . .

I'm reading this nifty book called Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Lis checked out four books on similar, inter-relating topics -- Traffic about how we act when we drive, and what happens with cars in general, Sway, about how difficult it is to avoid irrational behavior, Buyology, about our neurological reactions to advertisement and marketing, and this one.

There are a few cases in the four books where people reference the same studies, but, mostly, they're looking at their own things. It's just that, well, reading them all in a row like that, you are getting four very different angles on one very similar thing: how we think and react, and why logic isn't usually part of it. And the four books interlock really well, and synergize like Voltron to form a tract that is more that four times as powerful and useful as any of the books on their own.

Anyway. Maybe I'll write a post about that at some point.

But that's not what I was thinking about writing NOW.
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