Imagine a huge community dinner, with families and people of every vocation gathered under a large tent for a great celebration. Out comes the mashed potatoes and people in one corner of the tent are served a tidy rounded teaspoonful. At another part of the tent, a gentleman is served a whole pot of mashed potatoes, and then another and another, until the mound of mashed potatoes on his plate is higher than his head. Murmurs of discontent grow louder throughout the tent. How wildly unfair, unhealthy, and impractical it would be to serve up such disparities; how unstable it would make the community. Yet this is exactly the state of CEO pay relative to the average worker in the United States, where there’s a towering ratio of over 300 to 1. And that’s average. If the gentleman were someone like Jeff Bezos (before he stepped down from Amazon), as compared with a frontline Amazon worker, the ratio would be 300,000 to 1. Some people in the tent are starving while others are amassing more potatoes than they could eat in 4000 lifetimes.
Of course, money is not like mashed potatoes. We can eat only so many mashed potatoes and most of us know when we’ve had enough. Whereas money can be traded for so many things, including properties and goods, lobbyists and politicians, favorable tax policies and regulations, and even fences around those properties and underground bunkers in New Zealand to protect from the social instability that these astronomical disparities give rise to. When we don’t know what enough is, we get caught in an insatiable cycle that imbalances our relationships with one another and with nature. It’s no coincidence that the three ethics of a less fragile, permaculture mindset are: care of the planet, care of people, and fair share. Because when we know no bounds to our share, we use up people and use up the planet; we even use up our self. If threats to our wellbeing and social stability, increased racial pain and inequalities, and growing climate emergencies are teaching us anything, it’s that we do well to rebalance to a less fragile, more fair and healthy state. Being able to gauge what’s enough and taking only a fair share will become essential to this rebalancing in our self and in all of our relationships.
It’s not surprising that we humans can lose track of what’s enough. We’re loaded with positive feedback loops in our nervous systems such that, when we feel rewarded by an action, we want to do it again. If we like something, we want more of it. Yet healthy human needs have a natural “fill line;” we know when we’ve eaten enough, and similarly when we’re safe enough, loved enough, respected enough and so on up Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Yet what psychologist, Arthur Janov, observed was if, as infants and young children, we can’t get one of our natural needs met enough—after all, we can’t feed ourselves or control our families—we substitute other needs for it. So, for example, if we don’t feel loved enough, we may substitute getting any kind of attention, from being a rebel to a high need achiever. But these proxy needs are insidious because they have no natural fill line (since they’re not “real” needs, but only stand-ins), and so they create an unfillable hole of never-enough.
In Buddhist descriptions of levels of consciousness, this insatiable hunger is one level above living in hell, i.e., the realm of the Hungry Ghost. Hungry Ghosts are often depicted as having tiny little mouths and great big stomachs—sort of like a teardrop—so that there’s no way they can get enough food in at the top to fill the bottom. This is a far cry from how we think about respected leaders and CEOs, yet this vein of never-enough can be running through even the most high-functioning adults among us. With enough self-awareness and honesty, we’re likely to find some veins of such hunger in ourselves. Add to that the social reinforcement of never-enough from “winning is the only thing” to the drive for “year-over-year double-digit growth,” to the “rags to riches” mythology of the American Dream, and you have the makings of a never-enough culture. The very idea of a fair share can sound anti-American.
Besides, the pragmatic person may ask, how could we ever determine what’s a fair share? Well, if we’re talking about CEO pay, we could follow the example of Harvard researchers, Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Michael Norton, and ask. In research spanning more than 16 countries, they asked people to estimate the ratio of CEO to worker pay and what they thought the ideal ratio should be. In every country, people estimated the ratio to be higher than the ideal, but even more surprising, the actual ratio was far higher than they estimated. For example, Denmark is often held up as the country that comes closest to getting it right in terms of executive compensation and an agile, healthy labor market. Danes estimated the ratio of CEO to unskilled worker pay to be 3.7 to 1, with the ideal being 2 to 1. The actual ratio was more like 48 to 1. This is still far lower than in the United States, which tops the list in compensation disparity at a whopping, actual ratio of 354:1, which is 50 times greater than even Americans said would be ideal.
What this research shows is that the scale of wealth that can be amassed at the top of companies is unimaginable to most people. To take the mashed potato metaphor further, it is orders of magnitude beyond the natural fill lines of healthy human needs, so it feeds an insatiable cycle of greed in the individual and creates instabilities in society. Moreover, this condition is not self-correcting, but rather keeps getting worse, as CEOs have the power to set pay. As the tide of executive compensation keeps rising, boards feel obliged to rise with it to stay competitive. According to the Economic Policy Council, the spiraling result is that CEO compensation has increased more than 1000% over the past 40 years, during which wages for the average worker have increased less than 14%.
In a natural system like a human body, something growing 70 times faster than everything around it would be called cancer, and it wouldn’t be long before it takes over the body and destroys it. In a garden, a plant growing 70 times faster than everything around it would be called an invasive species, and it would take over the garden and destroy its balance. Likewise, we can be pretty certain that the presence of super-earners who have increased their rate of earning 70 times faster than those around them, have taken over our society and destroyed its balance. They sense it, too. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to build armed encampments and bunkers in New Zealand.
A rebalancing is essential. Since business is caught up in this escalation of wealth disparity, government must play a critical role, as the Biden administration understands with its multi-trillion-dollar bills to invest in economic recovery, infrastructure, education, workforce development and climate action. Some of what pays for this can further address ballooning of CEO compensation. Among the solutions recommended by the Economic Policy Institute are reinstating higher tax rates at the very top, a luxury tax on compensation over a set cap, and higher tax rates on corporations that have an out-sized ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation.
A rebalancing at the personal level is also called for. For our own lives to feel more purposeful and less fragile, more generous and less isolated, more grounded and less lacking, we do well to sense what is our fair share in all of our dealings. In Zen Leadership, we apply the guideline to “Eat just Enough” to all our needs, being sensitive to natural fill lines (or curious about their absence) for enough security, enough belonging, personal power or achievement, so that we can better use ourselves to serve life, rather than using life to serve ourselves. Yes, we still have to eat—but just enough.
This practice is rooted in an even more literal application of Eat Just Enough that comes from how we take meals during periods of intensive Zen training. The group of meditators, seated around a chain of tables, are served from a common pot of food. The cook has estimated how much food is needed and, as the pot is passed, each person takes their share with awareness of how much food is left and how many people are left to be served. At the end of the meal, with proper awareness, there is no waste and no one is hungry. People are taken care of. The planet is taken care of. And everyone could discern their fair share. With the right intention, it’s just not that difficult.
If we applied this same practice to our community celebration in the tent, far fewer potatoes would be needed. No one would go hungry or feel short-changed. No one would be stuffed and sick from having eaten too much. People would feel they’re a part of a community rather than a showcase of disparities. This is not just a fanciful act of imagination, but a real baseline for what harmony with nature looks like.
We do well to find this harmony in our own lives, challenging the unfillable holes that would have us take advantage of others when we have the wherewithal to do so. We do well to find this harmony in our society, challenging the systems of greed that have created exorbitant inequalities. We do well to discern our fair share in all of our dealings and, for goodness’ sake, pass the mashed potatoes.
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If Executive Pay Were Like Mashed Potatoes - Forbes
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