It’s not a class war, it’s a meritocracy war
Merit is a fine principle. But the most painful revelation of the debate on high pay may be this: many Britons are not convinced that they live in a functioning meritocracy. Are the bosses bluffing? Assuming that voters are not suicidally casual about who holds Britain’s biggest jobs, their desire to slash bosses’ pay leads to one conclusion: the public does not believe that executives are as exceptional as today’s pay levels would suggest. Some voters may be ready for a gamble, believing that bosses are not as globally mobile as they claim to be and would stick around if their pay was cut. Others may be more cynical, suspecting that bosses are not as unusually talented as they claim, so that others could do as good (or as mediocre) a job for less.
I think this sums up perfectly the frustration being felt in the US by the working class. The fact that it was written in The Economist about the British working class is indicative of the fact this is a global, not a national issue.
What’s pervasive about this argument is the idea that a large class of people feel shut out of the opportunities that they are seeing available to others. Whether it’s justified or not may be beyond the point. In a world where a relative minority hold all the money, but a relative majority hold all the votes, and the internet makes activities more transparent, we may find that populism will win out over backroom dealmaking and regulatory loopholes.
What’s a high-paid CEO going to do when he wakes up one day and finds that millions of people have been mobilized on Facebook and Twitter to not purchase his company’s products because they think his stock option package is too big?
What’s an incumbent senator going to do during election season when he knows that all his campaign donors and their pet causes are listed on the screens of everyones smartphones as the voters head into the voting booth?
(Source: economist.com)
