Thoughts on the economy and the issue of wage disparity in Britain.

[pantheia]

Martin Sorrell, who is CEO of WPP Group, a marketing company, and regularly receives annual wages of 20 million, defends the right of top earners to pay these massive amounts even within a recession. The justification he gives is the same I heard repeatedly on TV during the recent banking crisis of (2009?) - that massive bonuses must still be

Comments

[charlycrash]

Also: I don't know if you've evere encountered this one but there's a distinctly disingenuous fact that conservatives love to use to "prove" that class mobility is possible: that everyone's income at about 22-25 is more or less equal, but a large percentage of people steadily climb in income but others don't. They see this as some sort of evidence that class mobility is happening.

Which is bollocks, for a couple of reasons:

1) Most people's affluence tends to rise over the course of their lives. Even if you left school with like one GCSE, there's a reasonable chance you'll be able to work up to a mid-level clerical position or something by the time you get to 65.

2) It's a bit like taking an unfertilised egg and a fertilised egg and, when only one of them hatches, saying that some eggs can choose to hatch.

You're not seeing the future effects of what has already occurred. Someone who left school at 16 may have worked up to being a manager of a Pizza Hut by the time they're 25, but given their qualifications that's probably about as far as they'll go. Mr Oxbridge will probably have just graduated by 25 and will be doing a fairly crappy graduate job by then for about the same wages as a Pizza Hut manager, but given THEIR qualifications they're likely to go a lot further.

I'm also tempted to go off on a rant about how, as much as the market genuinely can do good things, it's absolutely riddled with downsides and doesn't guarantee anything, let alone that the best goods will be produced in the most efficient and cheapest way - but I'll save that one for another time (incidentally, that's why I think a mixed market is far and away preferable to either a full regulated communistic market or a fully deregulated libertarian one).