CEO pay

Matt Yglesias, who'd get my vote for Best Blogger on the Planet, has a very nice summary of a NYT piece about CEO pay. His take:

Apparently Jeffrey Rein is 4.7 times the CEO that Steve Ballmer is. And Boeing has a CEO who’s a staggering 10.7 times more effective than the top executive at Microsoft. Considering that Microsoft is a pretty big, rich, and important company it seems fairly shocking that they would allow themselves to get along with such second-rate CEO talent. Meanwhile, Louis Gallois, CEO of Boening’s top competitor EADS (parent of Airbus, among other things), makes just 2.1 million euros. To be sure, that’s more than you get working for bargain-basement companies like Microsoft or Google, but given the genius and rationality of the free market it’s surprising that Airbus’ planes fly at all.

Definitely worth reading the whole post.