Recently I've heard that defense counsel may make useless objections, insisting on sources, etc. (taking care not to wear out the judge's patience!). By objecting you may get grounds for appeal. Or since "debate delayed is debate denied," waste opponent's time.
High school debaters may adopt a similar tactic: Make the opponent address useless nits and detract from the time he has to make his case.
The relationship is nonlinear.
Well! Something we agree on!
Are they being rewarded for their genius and profitability? Global Crossing, which never had a profitable year, filed in 2002 for one of the largest bankruptcies in history and its executives were accused of covering up an accounting scandal. The founder apparently walked away from bankruptcy with $750 million.
And were companies really ten times as big in 2000? "in 1960, GM had 500,000 employees on its payroll." U.S. Steel had 225,000 employees in 1929. (With cherry-picked companies and dates before 1980, am I comparing apples with persimmons? These are just numbers Google popped back to me in seconds. It would take effort to research your claim; for example Market Cap is a bad proxy without P/E factored in. You Google; refute your own claim!!
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That's not a very good yardstick because it's the economic size, not the employee size. Plot executive compensation against gross revenue. (Which still isn't all that good as vertical integration will reduce "revenue".)
Once again, I was unwilling to spend a sizeable fraction of an hour getting frustrated with Google. Google doesn't know much but it DOES know how many EMPLOYEES companies had decades ago.
In the olden days I often added "historical graph" to a Google search and got charts going back decades. But Generation Z rules now, and anything before 2000 AD might as well be in the Age of the Dinosaurs.
In other words I went with EMPLOYEE count because that's what Google was able to give me. I did come across a VERY cutesy YouTube showing market caps beginning long ago but the raw market cap numbers must be adjusted by (a) productivity, (b) inflation, and (c) market sentiment (e.g. P/E ratio).
Employee count was an adequate proxy to make what is, really, a trivial point.
@Loren -- Don't take this the wrong way, but do you treat these dialogs like high school debates and use delaying tactics?
It honestly seems that way.
If YOU have data to support YOUR claim PLEASE present it. If instead you just want to nitpick that there are slightly better measures than employee count, you're just wasting everyone's time.
Did you think about the statistic I quoted? Between 1980 and 2000 the CEO/Worker wage ratio INCREASED TEN-FOLD Is Ten a big number?
Even if the "largeness" of the average large company increased ten-fold over this period (It didn't; not even close), as you yourself should realize the relationship to that wage/ratio "should" be SUB-linear. Otherwise what would we see? Suppose the CEO of a company with a million employees gets $100 million. Dividing by 50,000 would mean the chief of a small company with 20 employees "should" get annual salary of $5000 -- much less than minimum wage.
I spent several minutes typing this, just for you. Touché ?