It also seems clear to me, though, that one cannot have an economy based on casinos on the one hand and a social ethic that deplores demoralizing displays of wealth on the other. Casinos are all about small chances for big gains. The extended discussion on taxonomic categories seems to be moving in a very constructive direction. Had the data given me different patterns, I would have happily chosen a different labeling scheme. One interesting feature of this approach is that it implies one should remain flexible in the face of evidence collected about other parts of the economy or at the international level.
All categories have fuzzy boundaries, or to put it another way, the economy is fractal.
It seems to me useful to distinguish between forms of pay that represent ownership shares, and that are therefore claims on wealth and on the increase in the valuation of the firm, and forms of pay that are deductions from revenue. The former do indeed turn a small elite of top managers into valuation-maximizers, but this is a matter of the distribution of corporate valuation, not a use of any current resource. Top manager pay and benefits in the usual sense, as Legge says, come out of gross margin. In fact there seems to me to have occurred in recent months a rapid decline in the currency of these notions. CU has received quite a large number of reviews to date, and a striking fact is that nobody yet has attacked its core argument on behalf of the neoclassical economics.