Stevieslaw: You Get What You Pay For
Today, we learned in the New York Times lead article that the top 25 hedge fund managers received 11.6 billion dollars in compensation this year. While some among us (the 99% perhaps) may consider this excessive, we must learn to balance their compensation against the fine work they do. There is no need to remind you just what a hedge fund is and what it takes to manage one—we need only to look at the record. This year hedge fund managers have vowed to cure cancer in the coming decade (National Cancer Institutes’ budget is just under 5 billion a year), end the threat of global warming (NASA’s budget for earth and planetary science is roughly 3 billion dollars a year), and indeed jump start all science research as a way of building the new economy (the budget for the National Science Foundation is about 7.7 billion this year).
At a time when the gulf between rich and poor in our country has grown so vast that we cannot see each other across it, it is heart-warming to note that for once we got it right. The cost of hedge fund managers—11.6 billion: Their value to the nation and society in general—priceless.