Does anyone deserve such a paycheck?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-786-million-question-does-steve-schwarzman--or-anyone--deserve-to-make-that-much/2019/01/04/ea9f9e9c-0df1-11e9-84fc-d58c33d6c8c7_story.html?utm_term=.ac7ec6010ba3

 

Nice column from Steven Pearlstein.

 

“Markets … are social constructs, and the idea that they generate a distribution of income based on a purely objective measure of individual economic contribution is a fiction, nothing more than free-market ideology. When it comes to the distribution of income, there is no “pure” market. Any distribution is, by its nature, “political,” reflecting changing social norms and the distribution of political power.

 

“[If] we, as a society, decide that we find the current distribution of income unacceptable — if it offends our moral intuitions that a single financier earns as much in a year as 15,000 elementary school teachers — then it violates no great moral or economic principle to alter that distribution.”