Highlights
Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, "actually, your boss is right."
Now, Lowe's has 285,000 employees, half of whom earn less than $33,000/year. Divide Ellison's $18m among those workers and each of them would net a paltry $126/year. But if you were to share out the $43 billion Ellison had to piss up against a wall on stock buybacks among those workers, you'd be able to give every worker a $30,000 bonus, every year:
The largest 20 companies in the Low-Wage 100 spent nine times more on stock buybacks than they spent on worker retirement plan contributions. Chipotle spent $2b on buybacks – that's 48 times what the company put into its workers' 401(k)s. That's because 92% of Chipotle employees can't afford to have a 401(k).
In incentivizing CEOs to keep share prices high above every other consideration, establishment economists set the stage for a corporate America where CEOs were punished for investing in a living wage, a dignified retirement, or even a non-lethal product. Instead, we have a business environment that boils down to a competition to see who can eat their seed-corn the fastest.