Matthew Yglesias explains compensation economics to Dean Baker.
The Washington Post takes a look at Fannie Mae’s new board. Dean Baker takes a look at the Post’s skewed priorities:
The remarkable part of this story is that the Washington Post reporter could not find a single person who thought that paying part-time workers $160,000 a year was a bad idea. There is absolutely no one cited in this piece who raised a question about the compensation levels for the board.
Keep in mind that this is a newspaper that is absolutely apoplectic over autoworkers getting $27 an hour. If we assume that the board members on average will devote 500 hours a year to their board duties, this puts their pay rate at $320 an hour.
Look, super-high salaries for the already wealthy equal necessary incentives for prosperity. Relatively high wages for the working class equals productivity destroying union malfeasance. That’s not really so hard to understand, is it?