Why CEOs Are Paid So Much More than Other Near-Top Execs

 

   Source of graph:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

 

(p. A1)  Like most companies, Office Depot has long made sure that its chief executive was the highest-paid employee. Ten years ago, the $2.2 million pay package of its chief was more than double that of his No. 2. The fifth-ranked executive received less than one-third.

But the incentive for reaching the very top of the company is now far greater. Steve Odland, who runs Office Depot today, made almost $12 million last year, more than four times the compensation of the second-highest-paid executive and over six times that of the fifth-ranking executive in the current hierarchy.

As executive pay has surged in most American companies, attention has focused on the growing gap between the earnings of top executives and the average wage of workers in cubicles or on the shop floor. Little noticed, though, is how much the gap has also widened between the summit and the next few echelons down.

. . .

The pay of chief executives, analysts say, is being driven by superstar dynamics similar to those that determine the inordinate rewards for pop stars and athletes — a phenomenon first explained by Sherwin Rosen of the University of Chicago in (p. C7) 1981 and underlined more than a decade ago by the economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook in their book “The Winner-Take-All Society” (Free Press, 1995).

As American companies, American hedge funds — and even American lawsuits — have grown in size, it has become ever more valuable to get the “best” chief executive or fund manager or litigator. This has fueled a fierce competition for talent at the top, which has pushed economic rewards farther up the ladder of success, concentrating the richest pay levels even more.

“There is an interaction between technology and scale which is true in all these businesses,” said Steven N. Kaplan, a finance professor at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. “One person can oversee more assets, and this translates into more money.”

. . .

As companies grow and expand globally, the value of the top executive can grow exponentially. In a study last year, two economists, Xavier Gabaix of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Augustin Landier of New York University, argued that the fast rise in pay of corporate C.E.O.’s mostly reflected the growing size of American corporations.

Processing reams of data, the economists estimated that hiring the most effective chief executive in the country would, statistically, increase the stock value of a company by only 0.016 percent, compared with hiring the 250th chief executive. But at a company like General Electric, which is worth about $380 billion, that tiny difference would amount to $60 million.

This, the economists argued, helps explain why that top chief executive earned five times as much as the 250th. “Substantial firm size leads to the economics of superstars, translating small differences in ability to very large deviations in pay,” the economists wrote.

 

For the full story, see: 

EDUARDO PORTER.  "More Than Ever, It Pays to Be the Top Executive."  The New York Times  (Fri., May 25, 2007):  A1 & C7.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

“The Engine of Prosperity is Technological Progress”

 

Steve sometimes writes clever, entertaining essays on issues of little policy importance (like whether a rational person should stand still, or move forward, on escalators).  But in the piece excerpted below, he does a great job of discussing the biggest policy issue of them all:  what drives economic progress?

 

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Then it got even better. By the 20th century, per capita real incomes, that is, incomes adjusted for inflation, were growing at 1.5% per year, on average, and for the past half century they’ve been growing at about 2.3%. If you’re earning a modest middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and if you expect your children, 25 years from now, to occupy that same modest rung on the economic ladder, then with a 2.3% growth rate, they’ll be earning the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $89,000 a year. Their children, another 25 years down the line, will earn $158,000 a year.

Against a backdrop like that, the temporary ups and downs of the business cycle seem fantastically minor. In the 1930s, we had a Great Depression, when income levels fell back to where they had been 20 years earlier. For a few years, people had to live the way their parents had always lived, and they found it almost intolerable. The underlying expectation — that the present is supposed to be better than the past — is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago.

. . .

The source of this wealth — the engine of prosperity — is technological progress. And the engine of technological progress is ideas — not just the ideas from engineering laboratories, but also ideas like new methods of crop rotation, or just-in-time inventory management.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

STEVEN LANDSBURG.  "A Brief History of Economic Time."   The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., June 9, 2007):  A8. 

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

Japanese Engineers Taking Bigger Risks and Getting Bigger Rewards

 

   In front is engineer Kazumitsu Nakamura, retired from Japan’s Hitachi, and now working for a Hitachi subsidiary in Taiwan.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

(p. C1)  HSINCHU, Taiwan — One of the hottest exports from Japan these days isn’t video games or eco-friendly cars.

It is engineers.

. . .

. . . , the recent export of job seek-(p. C5)ers is a sign of just how much Japan has changed during a decade of increased competition, corporate belt-tightening and the end of lifetime job guarantees. This harsher new world has forced Japan’s famously conservative salarymen to become more aggressive in their job choices, and to view their careers as something for their own benefit and not simply their companies’, employment experts say.

This shift in mindset also underscores how Japan’s long-closed economy is finally integrating with that of its neighbors. China has already replaced the United States as Japan’s biggest trading partner, and many Japanese now see their nation’s and their own personal future as linked to Asia’s red-hot economies.

“Salarymen are taking bigger risks,” said Mitsuhide Shiraki, a professor of economics at Waseda University in Tokyo. “They’re making a logical decision to work in Asia, where they are being better rewarded than in Japan.”   . . .

. . .

There has also been a growing number of retired engineers wanting to go to less-developed economies where their skills are still highly valued, allowing them to pursue second careers late in life.

“In Asia, we can keep contributing to society,” said Kazumitsu Nakamura, 64, a former engineer for Hitachi who quit to go to Taiwan, and was recently hired by a Hitachi subsidiary to train Taiwanese employees. “In Japan, we would just be collecting pensions.”

. . .

. . .   For Tatsuo Okamoto, a 51-year-old semiconductor engineer, the biggest change was the speed in decision-making at the Taiwanese company, Winbond Electronics, which hired him away from the Tokyo-based chip maker Renesas Technology two years ago.

Dr. Okamoto recalled one instance when a 15-minute chat in the hallway with Winbond’s president was enough to win immediate approval to purchase millions of dollars worth of factory equipment. The same decision in Japan would have taken days of committee meetings, he said.

Dr. Okamoto said the experience opened his eyes to the problems that were hobbling the competitiveness of Japan’s electronics industry.

“Joining a Taiwanese company was a high-risk, high-return decision,” Mr. Okamoto said. “But staying in Japan had become a high-risk, low-return proposition.”

 

For the full story, see: 

MARTIN FACKLER.  "A Japanese Export: Talent  Company; Technologists See Brighter Prospects in Other Parts of Asia." The New York Times  (Thurs., May 24, 2007):  C1 & C5.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

    Source of graph:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

 

NASA Leader Attacked for Good Sense on Global Warming

 

How much of global warming is due to human activity is far from clear.  And if the current, modest, gradual warming continues, there will be winners and losers, and plenty of time to adjust.  Winners will include, for instance, those pursuing agriculture in northern regions, and shippers seeking a feasible ‘Northwest Passage.’

Economic forecasting is highly inaccurate beyond a few months out, for most variables, So who can honestly claim to know that the long-term losses of the losers will be larger than the long-term gains of the winners?

And if I am right, then what Michael Griffin said below, makes sense, and did not deserve the contempt and vitriol he received from the global warming environmentalists.

 

(p. A21) “I have no doubt that global — that a trend of global warming exists,” the administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, said in a taped interview that was broadcast Thursday on National Public Radio. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that is a problem we must wrestle with.”

“I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings,” he said. “I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

. . .

Jerry Mahlman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said Mr. Griffin’s remarks showed he was either “totally clueless” or “a deep antiglobal warming ideologue.”

James Hansen, a top NASA climate scientist and lead author of the research paper, said the comments showed “arrogance and ignorance” because millions of people will probably be harmed by global warming.

 

For the full story, see: 

"NASA Leader: Who Says Warming Is a Problem?"  The New York Times  (Fri., June 1, 2007):  A21.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

 

Ethanol Subsidies Reduce Incentives to Build New Oil Refineries


  Source of graphs:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

 

(p. A1)  “If the national policy of the country is to push for dramatic increases in the biofuels industry, this is a disincentive for those making investment decisions on expanding capacity in oil products and refining,” said John D. Hofmeister, the president of the Shell Oil Company. “Industrywide, this will have an impact.”

The concerns were echoed in a recent report by Barclays Capital, which said the uncertainty about the ethanol growth “will do little to accelerate desperately needed investment in complex United States refining units.”

“Indeed, it is likely to deter and further delay investment, if not rule out many refinery investments completely.”

. . .

(p. A15)  As a result of the push for biofuels, and encouraged by federal subsidies and grants, dozens of ethanol distilleries are being planned. These investments should double the annual production of ethanol from corn to 15 billion gallons by 2012 from about 6 billion gallons today.

But given farmland constraints and the need to use corn for food, that is as much ethanol as can possibly be produced from corn, according to the ethanol industry’s own calculations. Ethanol producers recognize that it is not clear how an additional 20 billion gallons of ethanol — President Bush has called for 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017 — would be produced from cellulose or biomass.

“The current thinking is that based on today’s technology, we suspect corn-based ethanol will generate at least 15 billion gallons,” said Brian Jennings, the executive vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol, an association of ethanol and corn producers. “Beyond that, it’s uncertain. The marketplace will make that determination on where it will come from.”

Yet some members of Congress would like to make the president’s goal for biofuels a mandatory target — the equivalent of 2.3 million barrels a day that would, in effect, create an ethanol industry roughly the size of world-class oil producers like Kuwait or Nigeria.

The economics of cellulosic ethanol, made from nonfood crops and agricultural waste, are also unclear. Since cellulosic ethanol, still at an experimental stage, is twice as expensive as corn-based ethanol, there are currently no commercial-scale cellulosic plants.

Lawrence Goldstein, an energy analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, an industry-financed group, has been warning for nearly a year that the government’s twin goals of encouraging refiners to increase production and promoting increased supplies of biofuels work against each other.

“These two policies are not complementary,” Mr. Goldstein said. “These policies are in conflict.”

In addition, Mr. Goldstein said, an emphasis on ethanol might lead to increased volatility in fuel prices.

“If we get a bad corn crop, we will end up paying for it at the pump and on the food shelves,” he said. “We are not buying security. We are increasing volatility.”

 

For the full story, see: 

JAD MOUAWAD.  "Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump."  The New York Times  (Thurs., May 24, 2007):  A1 & A15.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

    A trucker getting ready to fill his tanker at a Mississippi refinery.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.


Ethanol Costs Increasingly Obvious

 

Corn ethanol seemed unstoppable, but a remarkable thing happened on the road from Des Moines. Just as the smart people warned, the government’s decision to play energy market God and forcibly divert huge amounts of corn stocks into ethanol has played havoc with key sectors of the economy. Corn prices have nearly doubled, which means livestock owners can’t afford to feed their animals, and food and drink manufacturers are struggling to buy corn and corn syrup. Environmentalists are sour over new stresses on farmland; international aid groups are moaning that the U.S. is cutting back its charitable food giving, and many of these folks are taking out their anger on Congress.

. . .

Turns out there are huge economic consequences to Congress micromanaging energy policy, and all to aid its campaign donors in agribusiness. A lesson the U.S. is now learning the hard way.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL.  "POTOMAC WATCH; Ethanol’s Bitter Taste."  The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., May 18, 2007):  A16.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

Easily Available Capital and Technology Lower Barriers to Entry in Oil Industry

 

CobaltOilDataAnalysis.jpg   "Cobalt scientists analyze data to help pinpoint oil deposits."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

(p. 1)  HOUSTON.  JOSEPH H. BRYANT, still boyish-looking at 51, jostles with glee among tens of thousands of people here at the Offshore Technology Conference, one of the energy industry’s biggest trade fairs. He is surrounded by newfangled technologies occupying more than half a million square feet of display space: drills stuffed with electronic sensors, underwater wells shaped like Christmas trees, mini-submarines and pipes, pumps, tubes, gauges, valves and gadgets galore.

“There is every little gizmo you need to make this business work,” Mr. Bryant says, joyously. He stops at a plastic model of an offshore oil rig, an exact replica of a huge platform he commissioned while running BP’s business in Angola a few years ago. “I love this stuff.”

Like the pieces of a giant puzzle, the parts showcased here could fit together and build an oil company — and that’s exactly what Mr. Bryant set out to do two years ago after a 30-year career directing energy projects for the likes of Amoco, Unocal and BP. With a team composed largely of retired energy executives, he wants to hunt for oil in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or offshore West Africa, challenging Big Oil in its own backyard.

The American oil patch, once left to languish during an extended period of low oil prices, is on the rebound. Wildcatters like Mr. Bryant are ready to pounce. With oil prices now hovering around $60 a barrel — three times higher than they were throughout the 1990s — the industry is expanding at a pace last seen decades ago.

“The oil industry has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” Mr. Bryant says. “Barriers to entry have dropped significantly. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in the business 100 years or 100 days.”

Easily available capital and technology, once the preserve of traditional oil companies, are reordering the business. Investors are lining up to finance energy projects while leaps in computing power, imaging tech-(p. 7)nology and collaborative online networks now allow the smallest entities to compete on an equal footing with the biggest players.

“There’s a lot of money out there looking for opportunities,” said John Schaeffer, the head of the oil and gas unit at GE Energy Financial Services. “It seems like everyone wants to own an oil well now.”

Still, oil exploration remains a costly business fraught with peril. While the odds have improved, success is elusive; three-quarters of all exploration wells come up dry, either because there is no oil or because geologists miss its exact location. All of which means that Mr. Bryant’s start-up, Cobalt International Energy, which plans to begin drilling next year, faces formidable hurdles.

“There’s no sugar-coating this — at the end of the day, it’s a high risk venture,” Mr. Bryant says. “Financially, we’re definitely wildcatting. It’s either all or nothing.”

 

For the full story, see: 

JAD MOUAWADA.  "Wildcatter Pounces; Oil Riches Lure the Entrepreneurs."  The New York Times, Section 3  (Sun., May 20, 2007):  1 & 7.

 

 BryantJosephOilWildcatter.jpg   Wildcatter entrepreneur "Joseph H. Bryant started Cobalt."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited above.

 

The Courage of Milton Friedman

 

The following two paragraphs are from a paper I am currently working on.

 

Milton Friedman wrote a Newsweek column many years ago that caused a firestorm of anger among his colleagues in the economics profession. Friedman’s argument was that, in general, the government is not going to do a good job of identifying the best and most productively innovative economists. In particular, he argued that economics funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) had made the economics profession more mathematical than was appropriate.

Even his ‘Chicago’ colleagues, who were otherwise inclined to be sympathetic to his work, were appalled: Robert Lucas wrote against Friedman in the New York Times, and Zvi Griliches spoke against him before Congress. 

 

Not too long after Friedman’s article came out, I praised it during one of the sessions of a Liberty Fund colloquium held in California.  After the session, a very distinguished economist came up to me, and started talking about the Friedman article in a very irritated and animated manner.  He said that what Friedman wrote in the article, might be true, but he shouldn’t have written it in a public forum.[i]  He said that within the NSF, the physicists have always been opposed to funding economics, and that Friedman’s article gave the physicists just the ammunition they needed.  I remember distinctly that after this conversation, the distinguished economist got into his very large and very expensive car and drove off.  To the cynical, it may also be worth mentioning that this economist had received very substantial funding from the NSF.

I also remember mentioning to George Stigler my disappointment that Lucas had written contra Friedman, and Stigler gave me his cynical smile, and said that I should have expected that Lucas, and the rest of the profession, would defend NSF funding.

[i] Most of the conversation I remember in broad terms, but specifically, I remember he said something very close to:  ‘Friedman shouldn’t air the profession’s dirty laundry in public.’

 

The reference for the Friedman article, is: 

Friedman, Milton.  "An Open Letter on Grants."  Newsweek, May 18 1981, 99.

Private Companies Beat Government in Accessible and Affordable Health Care

 

MinuteClinic.jpg    A CVS pharmacy MinuteClinic.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ article cited below. 

 

It’s Friday evening and you suspect that your child might have strep throat or a worsening ear infection. Do you bundle him up and wait half the night in an emergency room? Or do you suffer through the weekend and hope that you can get an appointment with your pediatrician on Monday — taking time off your job to drive across town for another wait in the doctor’s office?

Every parent has faced this dilemma. But now there are new options, courtesy of the competitive marketplace. You might instead be able to take a quick trip on Friday night to a RediClinic in the nearby Wal-Mart or a MinuteClinic at CVS, where you will be seen by a nurse practitioner within 15 minutes, most likely getting a prescription that you can have filled right there. Cost of the visit? Generally between $40 and $60.

These new retail health clinics are opening in big box stores and local pharmacies around the country to treat common maladies at prices lower than a typical doctor’s visit and much lower than the emergency room. No appointment necessary. Open daytime, evenings and weekends. Most take insurance.

Much like the response to Hurricane Katrina, private companies are far ahead of the government in answering Americans’ needs, this time for more accessible and more affordable health care. Political leaders across the country seeking to expand government’s role in health care should take note. 

 

For the full commentary, see:

GRACE-MARIE TURNER.  "Customer Health Care."  The Wall Street Journal  (Mon., May 14, 2007):   A17.

 

Dinner with Hayek

 

Recently (6/10/07) at dinner with a group of foreign graduate students at George Mason University, I learned that one of the students was from Venezuela, and so I mentioned to her that one of my friends during my graduate student days at the University of Chicago had been from Venezuela, and that he had been responsible for bring F.A. Hayek to speak at the University.  When I said his name was “Cartea,” she said that she had had a professor named Cartea who was an admirer of Hayek, but who had unfortunately died in an accident a few years ago.

This was surprising and distressing news.

Cartea had charisma, and was not afraid to use it.  He was not always a model of responsible behavior, but he had such child-like enthusiasm, that it was hard to be mad at him for long.  One of his main weaknesses is that he loved books.  Often he would bring me his latest purchase from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, hold it up, and say in his inimitable accent and cadence:  “Pure Gold!”    

In Chicago, I had a car, and Cartea did not.  He asked if I would drive him to pick up Hayek and Hayek’s wife at the airport.  When we got to the airport, Cartea was hungry and wanted to stop and get a hamburger.  I thought it was not prudent to take the time to do this, but Cartea was insistent, and we stopped. 

We ended up getting to the gate just barely by the time of the Hayeks’ scheduled arrival (these were the innocent pre-terrorism days when you could actually meet guests at their gate).  But to our dismay, we learned that the flight at arrived early, and apparently Hayek had grabbed a cab to the University.

So we drove to the Center for Continuing Education where the Hayeks were staying.  There we learned that they had headed to the then-best restaurant in Hyde Park, called something like the “Courtyard.” 

At some point along the way, while still in the airport I think, Cartea purchased a single rose.  We walked into the restaurant, and found the Hayeks.  And then, with a charm that I could admire, but not imitate, he flamboyantly presented the rose to Mrs. Hayek, to her obvious delight.  (I do not remember what he said, or how he explained-away our absence from at the airport—I do remember that the word “hamburger” did not pass his lips.

The pleased Hayek invited us to join them for dinner.  We did.  It was just me, Cartea, and the Hayeks, and it stuns me to think that of the four, only I am still alive.

I would like to be able to report that some deep issues of classical liberal political theory were discussed, but if they were, I have no memory of that.  My memory is that the discussion was mainly of a personal, small-talk variety.  For example, one or both of the Hayeks had long wanted to view a solar eclipse, so they had recently flown to somewhere in the world where such an eclipse had occurred.

And I remember Hayek teasing Mrs. Hayek for delaying their being together by marrying someone else before Hayek, and I remember her teasing him back that he should have made his intentions clear earlier.  (This was the second Mrs. Hayek; at some point I learned that he had divorced the first Mrs. Hayek.)

I only have a couple of other memories of this visit of Hayek to Chicago.  One was when (the next day?) Cartea had me drive Hayek to a press conference downtown.  Hayek thought I was going the wrong way, and was annoyed.  I was pretty sure I was going the right way (and it turned out I was right), but it was stressful for a graduate student to be disagreeing with an insistent, and highly admired, Nobel-prize-winner.

Another disjointed memory is that sometime during the visit I asked him to sign my copy of the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty.  This he did with a disdainful frown, seeming to be annoyed that I would bother him with such a foolish request.

 

(Note one:  I do not remember when the dinner described above occurred, although it could be learned; I bet David Theroux of the Independent Institute would remember.  I was at the University of Chicago from the fall of 1974 through the spring of 1981; and I think the Hayek visit occurred sometime during the latter half of this period.)

(Note two:  this was not the first time I had encountered Hayek.  I drove down to St. Louis with Joe Cobb and another libertarian Chicago student whose name I regrettably cannot remember.  I believe that it was on this occasion that I had a good talk with Phylis Schlafly’s son, who made an articulate economic argument against patents; I think he even gave me an article by someone to bolster his case.  Ben Rogge introduced Hayek.  What I remember about the introduction was that in part of it, Rogge made a polite, but strong, swipe at Ayn Rand, saying I think, that Hayek’s thinking was a much sounder grounding for a libertarian philosophy.  Rogge knew I was a strong Rand enthusiast, so I imagined that he was making the comment mainly for my benefit.  Before the introduction, Rogge offered to take me over to introduce me to Murray Weidenbaum, who was at the event.  I regret that out of some temporary shyness, I declined the offer.  Anyway, on the way back from St. Louis, the discussion was so intense and interesting that I neglected to attend to the gasoline indicator, and we ran out of gas in some small town in Illinois.  I managed to get us to the town gas station, but it was closed because the owner, and all employees, were attending some local social function.  We ended up having to stay overnight in this God-forsaken berg.  Joe was very mad at me.)

(Note three:  the blog entry above was written on 6/11/07.)

 

Liberal Actor Paul Newman Endorses Nuclear Power

 

   Paul Newman.  Source of photo: http://www.philly.com/dailynews/columnists/howard_gensler/7660986.html

 

WASHINGTON: Venerable actor Paul Newman, known for his movies, his auto racing and his organic salad dressings, weighed in Wednesday on a nuclear power plant in New York’s suburbs that some fear is a terrorist magnet.

The Indian Point plant is safer than military bases he has visited, Newman said.

Newman, the star of such films as "Cool Hand Luke," "Hud" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," visited the facility in Buchanan, New York, on Monday, according to Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, the company that owns Indian Point.

The veteran actor, restaurateur and organic-food producer praised the nuclear power facility as an important part of the region’s energy future because it does not produce greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming.

 

For the full story, see: 

"Renaissance man Paul Newman endorses nuclear power plant some consider a risk to New York."   International Herald Tribune  (Weds., May 23, 2007).