Analyses on this topic are always so bad. Some counterpoints:
(1) CEOs are intentionally aligned with shareholders, for good reason. Shareholders often make money due to luck, so eliminating luck from CEO compensation without breaking alignment is a very hard problem.
(2) Going in, a CEO (or a shareholder) needs to lock down a big future payday in the upside case, in order to compensate them for the risk of the downside case. Yes, the upside case usually involves some luck, but the "optionality" to get paid in a lucky outcome is a valuable part of the deal.
(3) CEOs are also paid to be trustworthy agents for shareholders/boards. Like... if I am a billionaire looking for you to oversee a big part of my capital, I may pay a lot just because I know you are a good/smart/reasonable person who will be autonomous but raise the right issues to me if needed, reliably. I might know all that just because we have been buddies for years, and even though there are lots of objectively more talented people out there who would do the job for less, paying you more would not be irrational for me.
(1) The study specifically talks about the motivational effect of performance pay and finds that the component of luck means that performance pay must be more difficult to achieve in order to motivate the executive officers to align their interests with the company.
(2) You could reduce the financial risk of executive officers by paying them a fixed salary. In fact, different companies offer very different compensation plans. This was a review of those plans to see what did and did not work. Generous performance pay does not work.
(3) This is an issue of whether executive officers should be paid well in general, not the value of performance pay. And at any rate seems to be a justification for nepotism in an area of business that is already dysfunctionally nepotistic.
One might as well say: "20K+ fatalities on the Boko Haram insurgency, and counting, but you're up in arms about one maybe-murder in the most privileged city in the world."
Not every community needs to be about every thing.
Sigh, it is hard for me to imagine that this comment was made in good faith.
First of all, owning "free and clear" is hardly the expected meaning of ownership in the context of cars or especially houses in the US. I have a mortgage and I still say I own my house. When I told friends I was buying my house, I expect >90% of them assumed I was getting a mortgage. The government reported "homeownership rate" certainly does not exclude households with mortgages.
Second of all, ignoring semantics, the original context was a conversation about whether a significant number of households being unable to afford technology like a $5K computer would stifle innovation. Innovation probably doesn't care whether customers are in debt or not, so this is still perfectly decent evidence to cite about the spending capacity of poor households.
Well, it is also the world of professors, grad students, administrators, etc.
I know American culture is in love with undergrads and their "college experience", but I don't see why they are such key stakeholders that they should be allowed to demand that members of those other groups be fired and otherwise make their lives and work difficult.
Customers usually don't have any mechanism for getting the CEO fired other than not buying the product.
I am always annoyed by the argument that torture is unacceptable AND it doesn't work. It's not totally implausible that this is true, but I think it's very likely that torture "works" in some sense and certainly everyone practicing it expects it to work.
So... for an anti-torture position to have some meat to it, you have to make it clear that you think torture is unacceptable even when it does work.
If you're not willing to sacrifice real lives and safety to avoid torture, I don't think you are meaningfully against it, and you certainly stand no chance of persuading those convinced of its efficacy.
It may be counter productive to try and argue both (totally consistent) positions at once since it opens you up to the implication that if it somehow worked that you'd be OK with it. Still I don't see why we should allow pro torture advocates to own the conversation on whether it works. All evidence is to the contrary and its deeply unethical to continue trying it just in case it does. Even if not torturing did lead to innocent death's it would be the wrong choice to torture, but simultaniously I reject that as a false choice presented by torture advocates who want you to concede that it works and give power to their argument.
If someone wants to claim that some action has some effect it is on them to prove it not the rest of us to refute it. US torture advocates have had every opportunity to do so and failed.
Do you believe that all those people that signed confessions to witchcraft during the Inquisition were truthful?
What about all of the people that are tortured that don't have anything to do with terrorism? What sort of reparations do they receive? What sort of penalty does the US citizenry or the US government pay for those types of mistakes? It's easy to throw others under the bus to save yourself, but I'm not sure if the US can really claim to be the world's Moral Authority when they are doing such things.
the poster you're replying to is not saying that it definitely works, only that it might. and additionally (and this is the crux of that statement): even if it does work, it's still morally wrong.
I don't think the world is black and white like that.
Hypothetical: someone kidnaps a child and the police capture someone who definitely knows where the child is. The child's life is at risk. If the parent were to beat up (torture) the person to gain knowledge, you'd assume the parent "likes" torturing people? I wouldn't.
I was disagreeing with the idea that a hypothetical torturer necessarily expects it to work (and giving an example of an alternate theory for why they might be a torturer), not saying that all torturers like torturing.
"If you're not willing to sacrifice real lives and safety to avoid torture, I don't think you are meaningfully against it"
I completely agree with this, and it's the crux of the argument that I've made against torture when having that debate with people.
Whether it works or not is a cop out. Yes, I believe that torture is, in general, vastly counterproductive. But I also believe that there might be occasional cases where it happens to "work" for extracting factually true information (I put "work" in scare-quotes because there are all sorts of practical and moral side effects even if it does "work"). No matter: it's still morally wrong.
Most Americans believe in the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." That alone should be enough to imply that torture is wrong, since it is almost exclusively perpetrated against the unconvicted (and even if convicted, there's the whole prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment," which I'd bet most Americans would also claim belief in).
I guess there are many people who don't think it through that far. And I'd bet that there are many Americans who believe that those rights apply to other Americans, but not non-Americans, or enemy combatants, or whatever. Such people are, IMHO, cowardly assholes. Everyone deserves the same basic human rights.
I would not write them off - my whole point is that by making the double argument people are trying to avoid having to think about trade offs.
I get very suspicious when I see conjunctive arguments that neuter hard value judgments. It's extremely common to see them: "I think you doing X is objectionable AND it doesn't even work!" Example from the right:
Gun control is unconstitutional AND criminals will still get guns anyway!
In my experience, the second half of these arguments usually has nothing to do with the arguer's real motivations, it just helps him/her avoid cognitive dissonance from the trade offs.
>I think when he says "genuine", he means they are genuinely giving it a try, not that they are doing it out of pure spiritual authenticity.
Yeah, that makes sense.
>Most business decisions (and most decisions) are made on some other basis than passion, nothing wrong with that.
Well, I prefer it to be the other way. And I could trace most issues with QA, scams, etc, on that. If they don't love and take pride in what they sell, they shouldn't sell it.
Loving and having passion for what you do doesn't contradict making rational decisions.
Many business loved by their owners have been destroyed because of emotional attachments to business models that someone just as passionate but more rational could have saved.
I won't presume to tell you that you've evaluated your situation fundamentally incorrectly. If you've come to this point, I doubt that hearing "there is always hope" is going to sway you. Personally, I think you have the right to make whatever decision you like about your own life.
BUT: I know from my own life that it is easy to forget about the value of keeping your options open. Death really is permanent, and always available, so there is rarely a need to rush it. All kinds of unexpected good things really can happen... and if not... you can still kill yourself later.
SO: I'd suggest you make sure you adjust your thinking for the likely bias that you are undervaluing the option-value in all the unexpected good things you can't specifically imagine right now. If you have even a little uncertainty on this point... better to wait a bit and see, no?
Non sequitur. The discussion here is about how AirBnB's unregulated supply of rental property is impacting long term rents in NYC.
FWIW
NYC has added 30,000 new hotel rooms since 2007. It would seem that AirBnB is adding nearly the same # of rooms.
Zillow lists 25,000 rental units in NYC. This is the same order as the # of rooms being rented on AirBnB.
Why can't we accept that AirBnB is contributing to increasing rental prices in NYC? What's the point of pointing to hotels every time someone mentions AirBnB?
I would expect that the founders of AirBnB genuinely care about communities where they operate, and would be motivated to advance the community's interest.
Not a non-sequitur. The point is that AirBnB landlords are being singled out as though their apartments "belong" in some sense on the market, when nobody cares much about the million other ways real estate is re-purposed away from rentals. AirBnB is an easy target under the current legal framework, but it would be nice if we thought about the broader dynamics before going for the easy target. Hotels are a great example of an alternative: most NY hotels are actually converted apartment buildings. Every new hotel could be an apartment building instead. So... why don't those spaces "belong" in the rental market too?
Ultimately, if market forces make it more profitable for rooms to be used for short-term stays than as homes, it will be very hard to stop that from happening and not at all clear that we should stop it from happening. There are arguments the other way, but it is depressing to hear only the glib assumption that the free market must be stopped. For example, it's not ultra-obvious that policy should favor those who choose to live in Manhattan over those who choose to visit. Among other things, I think it's likely that the average income of the visitors is lower than that of whoever would be renting.
re: So... why don't those spaces "belong" in the rental market too?
That's a good discussion to have I think. But we are talking about Airbnb here.
re:
Ultimately, if market forces make it more profitable for rooms to be used for short-term stays than as homes, it will be very hard to stop that from happening and not at all clear that we should stop it from happening.
Yeah, you might be right. The cost of this is lack of affordable rent in cities like NYC. Some of us believe that we have a responsibility to ensure this. Now, the debate is about how big of a role Airbnb is playing in this.
> I would expect that the founders of AirBnB genuinely care about communities where they operate, and would be motivated to advance the community's interest.
I think acceptance by the community is essential for their business. If ones decides to shame Airbnb hosts in their buildings, it will present significant risk to Airbnb's business.
(1) CEOs are intentionally aligned with shareholders, for good reason. Shareholders often make money due to luck, so eliminating luck from CEO compensation without breaking alignment is a very hard problem.
(2) Going in, a CEO (or a shareholder) needs to lock down a big future payday in the upside case, in order to compensate them for the risk of the downside case. Yes, the upside case usually involves some luck, but the "optionality" to get paid in a lucky outcome is a valuable part of the deal.
(3) CEOs are also paid to be trustworthy agents for shareholders/boards. Like... if I am a billionaire looking for you to oversee a big part of my capital, I may pay a lot just because I know you are a good/smart/reasonable person who will be autonomous but raise the right issues to me if needed, reliably. I might know all that just because we have been buddies for years, and even though there are lots of objectively more talented people out there who would do the job for less, paying you more would not be irrational for me.