Friday, October 21, 2011

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Frances Woolley points out just how much more efficient public-sector health services are compared to private-sector alternatives by contrasting the cost of surgery on people with the far higher rates charged to private payors for veterinary services.

- Which leads nicely into Erin's critique of the Saskatchewan Party's effectively-nonexistent health care plan - particularly when the negligible amount of funding on offer is put in the context of the party's determination to push private service delivery.

- Just months into the Cons' majority, they're already starting a war on grandparents.

- Finally, Marc Lee takes on the luck vs. merit argument as to how the wealthiest among us reach that status - pointing out that the former factor is a major component in virtually any case. And that goes a long way to explaining how Mike Moffatt's salary analogy breaks down in utterly neglecting the possibility that the factors which add value to a business might arise from factors other than the sheer charisma of a single executive.

2 comments:

  1. Mike Moffatt7:58 a.m.

    Complete and utter strawman.  Honestly, you can do better than this.

    Take BCE - a company with revenues of $15B a year.  If the CEO's decisions affect revenue by even 1/10th of 1 percent, that's $15M - several times what the CEO makes.

    I'm not assuming the CEO affects revenues by 100%.  I have no idea, though, why you would assume it would absolutely, necessarily be 0%.

    Or to put it differently: Would Apple be where they are today if they had hired me as CEO in 1997 instead of hiring Steve Jobs?

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  2. jurist9:52 a.m.

    We discussed much of this on Twitter yesterday, but let's hash a bit of it out here too. I don't dispute that the occasional CEO can make a huge difference, but I'd demand some evidence to suggest that replacing the set of CEOs of, say, all "Canadian mining companies, Canadian retailers or even Canadian banks" with the next choices in line would result in their collectively performing substantially worse. If you want to make the "exceptional individual" argument, that militates against the argument that all CEOs (whether exceptional or not) deserve similar and similarly disproportionate levels of compensation.

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