These are a couple more of the things that have caught my attention lately.
This comment from a former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia questioning the morality of high financial rewards for company CEO’s? From Ian MacFarlane, ex-governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald 4th December.
“Increasing leverage is the easiest way to increase returns in a rising market, and there were incentives to chase these returns and to ignore or downplay the risks. The biggest misdirected incentive was the performance-based pay which awarded massive bonuses to management of financial institutions on the basis of short-term profit results. Annual bonuses in the millions of dollars were not returnable when the short-term profits were lost in subsequent years.”
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From Adele Horin, Sydney Morning Herald 13th-14th December 2008.
Adele also asks questions about morality, privilege and the part that money plays in all of this, and what sorts of money. She writes an article about the recently reported attempted bribing of a school teacher by a parent who wanted their child to enter a selective school. Adele says:
“Private school fees are legal, and so, too, university fees that allow people to jump the queue. But slipping teachers money to try to secure preferential treatment is not allowed.”
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I am always talking about the importance of being in charge as one of the key ingredients and indicators of wellbeing. Here is a related but somewhat different take on the idea of control by Hugh MacKay in the Sydney Morning Herald 13th-14th December 2008.
“The current obsession with control looks to me like a symptom of deep unease in our society. The yearning for control is a cry for help. The most useful response to that is not to say: “Here’s how to get your life under control but to explain that the deepest sense of wellbeing springs not from mastery of our circumstance let alone mastery of others but from mastery of ourselves.”