The insanity of pay for professional athletes (movie stars, rock stars, CEO’s)
I know all the arguments on the other side. If people are willing to pay for it, then why shouldn’t the athlete (movie star, rock star) earn as much as they can earn? They only get paid what the market will bear. People keep buying tickets to see these stars. They have only a few good years before injuries end their careers; in the case of singers and actors, they have only a few years before their looks or voices are no longer acceptable.
I suppose you could also argue for the corporate CEO’s that make 200 times (or more) the amount the lowest level person in their company makes. If a Board of Directors sees fit to pay them that much, they must be worth it.
My issues are these:
· Why should a CEO be paid so much money even if his company is failing, or if the company’s stock price is less than it had been the previous year, especially if they had to take a government bailout in order to avoid a total corporate meltdown?
· Why should a professional athlete be paid millions of dollars to PLAY A GAME?
· Why are actors paid millions of dollars to pretend to be someone else in a movie or television show?
· Why are Rock Stars paid millions of dollars to sing songs, act in videos?
Is there any inherent value in any of these pursuits? Does anyone care?
In my own analysis, I think that we all have our priorities backwards. We tend to downplay real measurable (academic/scientific) achievement and tend to accentuate “talent” instead. We all want to be the next “American Idol” or have our own reality show!! J
Here is where I would like to see the pay scale increase:
I think we should pay millions to the researcher who comes up with a cure for diabetes, cancer, heart disease, spinal cord injuries. Those discoveries would benefit not only my family but all of humanity.
I would be all for paying millions to the person who revamps the education system in our country so we can stop pouring our hard earned tax dollars into school systems that are failing our children and failing to keep our kids competitive with the rest of the world’s youth. This would help in all aspects of our country’s future
I could certainly get behind the person that develops the next form of energy that we can use instead of fossil fuel; that would enable us to free ourselves from dependency on other countries for our energy needs. Think of the political game change that would bring!
That is not to say that in order to earn millions of dollars you would have to benefit all of humanity with what you do. It just seems like a better model to me!
I am not saying that I don’t enjoy seeing a good hockey game, or concert, although I shudder to have to pay $100 for a decent seat at the TD Garden; I love music and have many artists I listen to regularly and have for most of my life. I watch movies all the time and realize how much it costs to make them; however it would cost a lot less to make them if you didn’t’ have to pay the stars $15 million to star in the picture!
The real issue is that we value our entertainment more than we do REAL achievement. Maybe in this sometimes scary and depressing world we live in, we don’t care how much it costs us to have some sort of escape….a movie, a concert, a sporting event…just to take our minds off the lousy world! But I contest that maybe the world would be less lousy if we focused our energies to changing it rather than escaping from it.
I am not advocating placing any kind of limit on pay for the “talented” athletes, actors, rock stars. That is up to the market. If you are willing to pay $150 bucks for a concert ticket, then by all means, go! But I do think we need to really think about how we got to this point, how do we motivate younger people to strive for other things besides being famous for being famous.
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