AS EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION BECOMES TOPIC A (AGAIN), THE REAL OUTRAGE IS HOW CEOS ARE PAID, NOT HOW MUCH

摘要

IT'S OUTRAGE SEASON, formerly known as proxy season, when recession-shocked Americans get furious at the new list of insanely overpaid CEOs. The leader so far is Occidental Petroleum chief Ray Irani ($59 million), an excessive-pay hall-of-famer, but he may be overtaken by others as more proxies are filed. The bad-boy headlines will misleadingly suggest that CEO pay levels overall are a problem. They're not. For hundreds of big-company CEOs, pay came down in the 2001 recession, rose in the expansion, and has come down again in this recession, just as you'd hope, according to research by the University of Chicago's Steven Kaplan. The inflation-adjusted average is lower than in 1998, at just over $11 million. That's nothing to sneeze at, of course, but the real problem is the way in which CEOs are paid - the incentives they're given. Despite new SEC disclosure rules and the painful recession, by some measures the situation is getting worse.