Tim Black on the amazing unanimity of thought that the most pressing problem in the world right now is big pay packets for corporate CEOs:
Occupy London, the Labour Party, the Lib-Con coalition, the Archbishop of York… It doesn’t matter to what or to whom you look, you’ll find the same simple-minded sentiment: the root cause of our economic and social problems is greed. The greed, that is, of bankers, of overpaid CEOs, of those at the top of society who simply have and want too much.
[. . .]
If there was ever a striking indication of the deadening political conformism, the dearth of social imagination, that so characterises our contemporary impasse, it is there in the sheer ubiquity of the Greed-is-Bad argument.
So what is driving this pervy, across-the-board obsession with the pay packets of super execs? It’s certainly not impelled by a desire to get to grips with the economic crisis that holds most of the developed world in its grip. No doubt there are some simple-minded souls in a state of Occupation who believe that blaming and bashing company CEOs or bankers is somehow to understand the economic crisis. But just as the remuneration packages of a few bankers and bosses did not bring about the current crisis, so seeking to limit their wages, to impose a maximum national wage, will not solve the crisis. And while £3million or £4milllion for a CEO’s annual salary does seem huge, such figures amount to very little in the grand economic scheme of things. As the Investor’s Chronicle points out: ‘The average FTSE 100 CEO is paid £3.9million year. But this is only one four-thousandth (0.025 per cent) of the average market capitalisation of a FTSE 100 company.’
The current fashion for attacking large pay packages, then, is economic neither in impulse nor intent. Rather it is driven, in the first instance, by a narrow moralism. For its numerous proponents, either in party offices or in spartan tents, it represents an easy posture, a cheap critical pose. One Guardian columnist virtually gave the game away: ‘Like phone hacking or MPs’ fiddled expenses, this is an issue that only needs to be described to seem reprehensible.’ That is, to the right-thinking types on liberal broadsheets, criticising large salaries is just too good an opportunity to miss. Indeed, like attacking tabloids and MPs, it is a mark of one’s membership of the right-thinking to have a pop at the really, really rich.
But there’s a deeper, darker impulse driving this cheap attack on exorbitant pay packages than just preening self-righteousness. And that’s the belief that the large pay packets pursued by the undeservedly wealthy are a symbol of a society-wide pathology. The cheap attack on top earners is also an attack on the material aspirations of the rest of us. We are, in short, just too greedy now to be left to our own unregulated, uncontrolled devices. A report from the High Pay Commission — a grandiosely monikered body established by centre-left think tank Compass, a few trade unionists and business secretary Vince Cable — makes this clear by drawing the highly questionable link between this putative celebration of ‘greed’ — or ‘an elevation of the concept of the rational self-interested man to unprecedented heights’ — and the August riots. ‘It should not perhaps surprise us’, the report states, ‘that the rioters took the trappings of wealth that they could not afford — the TVs and designer trainers. It reflects a sense of entitlement that pervades society from the very top to the bottom.’
