Those (grossly?) overpaid executives

The New York Time's editorial tackles the pay of those CEO. Too much? Worth the money?

"Major corporate filings for 2012 have now provided an updated portrait of executive pay. The median compensation of chief executives at 200 of the nation’s biggest public companies came in at $15.1 million last year, a 16 percent jump from 2011, according to Equilar, the executive compensation analysis firm. The pay packages — including salary, bonus, benefits, stock and option grants — ranged from $96.2 million at Oracle to $11.1 million at General Motors.

Is that excessive? One way to answer that question would be to look at the pay gap, the ratio of the pay of the chief executive to that of the company’s employees. But nobody really knows what the gaps are.

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"But corporations don’t want any of that. To hear them tell it, computing the pay gap is too hard. Nonsense. The real obstacle is that many chief executives do not want to have to defend what are sure to be some indefensibly large gaps.

There is no doubt that the gaps are huge. Using government data on worker pay, the Economic Policy Institute has calculated that the ratio of C.E.O. pay to employee pay was 273 to 1 in 2012, or 202 to 1, depending on how stock options were accounted for. Either way, that is far higher than it has been for most of the past 50 years."

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