CEOs are not paid for working hard, they are paid for BEING RIGHT, aka making the right strategic decisions. Bad CEO can bankrupt the company, good CEO can grow it's revenue ten times. You pay CEOs for their experience and expertise in running companies, not for the number of hours worked.
That's an idealistic, maybe even naive point of view. There are plenty of CEOs who generally make bad decisions and take increasingly more money while their companies lose money, their best workers, their most innovative projects and so on. Hierarchical power structures are always prone to corruption and value extraction from the bottom to the top.
In fact the above is so prevalent that I'm specifically admiring leaders who are exceptions, actually take responsibility and care more about their workers, clients and the many other people they impact as opposed to their individual gains via compensation and social currency at the top (board, shareholders etc.)
Also CEOs generally work hard regardless of the quality of their work. But they generally have a ton of responsibilities and people to talk to. In terms of time invested per day, it is not uncommon for them to do several hours more work than say an engineer.
(It's not the same _kind_ of hard though, I personally find social activities, reading and communication much less exhausting than technical work, but it's also less fun.)
Also likely that your average CEO is not spending time washing dishes, doing the laundry or grocery shopping. There is more capacity for "work" when the only work you do is your day job.
If you paid the CEO of McDonald's the same amount as a burger flipper, you are going to get someone who is wrong much more frequently. When we see that CEOs get things wrong, that seems to be more of an artifact of the future being hard to predict than any individual being stupid.
I'll bite: The CEO would do just fine at flipping burgers if that were their job. Honestly, after only a few weeks of training, the CEO will probably do better at flipping burgers than the average employee. Everyone sucks at a job when they start out and it's a strawman to say that if you took the CEO to flip burgers for a day, they would suck at it compared to someone who has been flipping burgers for years.
IQ helps predict job performance even among unskilled labor. CEO's tend to have high IQ, so you'd expect them to perform better than average people in unskilled labor as well once they have gotten comfortable with the role. (Statistical expect, that is the statistically expected performance of CEO's at the role vs the statistically expected performance of typical current employee, would still be lots of overlap)
The following study shows this connection for low skilled job. It also shows that the connection has to do with IQ correlating with better understanding of the role, so wont show until after the worker has learned it, but the connection is still there so you'd expect the CEO to learn the role better than an average employee.
That article concludes that it's very risky to use IQ tests to measure just about anything because there are heaps of weak data around them
> As others have pointed out, statistical corrections are no magical compensation for weak data and that it is risky to reach conclusions about test validities from those currently available (Oswald & McCloy, 2003; Russell & Gilliland, 1995). The only solution is properly conducted primary studies, with larger representative samples, better measures, and so on.
Here's the important bit that basically advises not using IQ tests in the exact way that you're using them:
> Until they are available, investigators should be extremely cautious about disseminating conclusions about IQ test validities, from correlations between IQ and job performance.
CEO is a job title, not a measure of intelligence, or even job performance. There are no shortage of shitty CEOs, just as there are no shortage of shitty performers in just about every possible job.
Working hard is not inherently valuable. You have to do something with your labor that other people value, which may require hard work. It might also require working smarter, creativity, taking advantage of a rare opportunity, making the right connections, etc. Of course luck is involved. Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?
>> Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?
If this means that this will increase morale of others, then why not?
For me mere existence of luck factor means that the system is not build for the people but for the benefit of the owners of the system. Its a bit like with the casino - in the end house always wins because the system is build with them in mind and not the players.
The existence of the luck factor is life. The house is the universe. Who you're born to, where you're raised, who you meet, what sort of advantages and disadvantages your particular biology affords you in whatever environment, what sort of ideas you might randomly come across, etc. There's no gaming that and there's no system that can make it all equal out. Someone buys a lottery ticket and they win, we don't take all their winnings and redistribute it because there would be no reason to play the lottery. Or gamble. Or create a startup. That we even exist as a species instead of some non-avian dinosaur descendant is the luck of a mass extinction event.
Sure, luck inherent to the nature and reality. We cannot get rid of it and cerate totally deterministic system. But that does not mean that we cannot minimalize it and that somehow it has inherently good value. I could argue that almost all our civilization exists because we eliminated randomness from our primal lifes.
