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Comment by quoderat | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that there are many qualified people in charity work who make barely-subsistence wages who would likely do an as-good or better job with far less pay.

So, for the most part, my guess is that $500,000+ salaries are a form of rent seeking, and are not justified in the so-called marketplace.

It'd be nice if someone could crash together the stats and see if this intuition bears out. You know, look at percentage of donations used to actually help their stated cause, and see if having a super-star CEO actually results in a more well-capitalized charity.

I doubt it, but I depend on evidence, not ideology.

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Did you read the article at all?

Take the case of the breast cancer charity which, from the article, was pulling in $71mm from charity walks using his services. They stopped using his services and continued the walks and are taking in $11mm now.

You might argue that several other variables might have also changed, but a 6.5x factor is hard to ignore.

I read the article. I wouldn't call one anecdote data, though it's about 1/10,000 of a good start.

That's a little harsh. It was a pretty significant anecdote - a 6.5x decrease with the only clear change being Pallotta's company-charity being forcibly stopped from continued involvement. Is there room for other plausible reasons to have caused the drop? Definitely. And of course if, hypothetically, Pallotta's company-charity was involved with sufficiently many causes, you would even expect there to be at least one anecdote with such a substantial drop. But to call it "1/10,000 of a good start" is much more unreasonable and illogical than thinking the anecdote might be of worth.

a 6.5x decrease

That would be negative 5.5 times, or 5.5 times below zero.

You might not call it that, but one anecdote is indeed data. A very small amount, to be sure -- but it's all we've got.

Tiny amounts of data can almost never prove a particular theory correct (in sociology, at least), but you're quite simply wrong if you think we can't get anything out of them. This particular data -- datum, I guess -- certainly can't show that charity CEOs in general earn their keep, but it so blatantly contradicts your theory that I think it's safe for us to assume that you're incorrect.

Is it possible that "there are many qualified people in charity work who make barely-subsistence wages who would likely do an as-good or better job with far less pay" and that the story's CEO's departure caused an 85% loss in the charity's income? Yes, of course. But it's unlikely. At the very least it seems like there needs to be some kind of barrier to hiring those people -- maybe it's impossible to determine which of these minimum-wage earners is actually a highly competent manager.

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