The professions that put the highest premium on IQ are the best paid and most prestigious.
Really?! Those low-IQ basketball players and football players with million-dollar contracts aren't members of the "best-paid" and "most-prestigious" professions?! Because being a sports star in modern America certainly doesn't place a high premium on IQ!
In a primitive tribal system, the smarter hunter gatherer might get an extra wife or two and a bit more food, but that is about it.
By getting an extra wife or two, he is doubling or tripling his reproductive success - which is really the only form of success that ultimately matters.
In actual fact, a very successful hunter might become chief of his tribe, and thus be entitled to a harem of several concubines. (Under natural conditions, the "Pareto Rule" which the author of this article frequently references applies also to reproduction.)
Thomas Sowell, in one of his books, rejects the notion that CEOs are overpaid. If the company is worth several billion dollars, then good and bad business decisions can have consequences worth millions or billions. In that case, it is worth paying a highly capable executive hundreds of millions of dollars given what is at stake. Trying to save money by paying the CEO less could easily be a false economy, costing the company far more in the big scheme of things.
Misdirection! The most-important criterion is paying the CEO a remuneration commensurate with his performance!
Unfortunately, the process of calculating his performance requires determining what would have happened if he had made other decisions (i.e., requires considering "alternate-world realities"). It is most decidedly NOT enough to "reward success" - because that success might, in fact, be attributable to factors in which the CEO played absolutely no role. The act of calculating the CEO's performance is thus equivalent to the CEO's performance, itself (= infinite regression). In other words: Only someone as smart and as diligent and as hard-working as the CEO himself is capable of determining if the CEO has delivered good work (i.e., is capable of determining if the company's overall success is attributable, not to "blind luck," but indeed to decisions which the CEO himself has made). The old "agent/principal" problem rears its ugly head yet again!
Regards,
The act of calculating the CEO's performance is thus equivalent to the CEO's performance, itself (= infinite regression recursion) [...]
Regards,
A CEO is paid to keep his mouth shut. The more he's paid, the more he needs to keep his mouth shut about.