A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
The New York Times recently reported that after 21 years as a cartoonist for the magazine Farm News, the services of Rick Friday, an Iowa farmer, would no longer be required. The offending cartoon merely stated that in 2015 the chief executives of three companies — Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and
John Deere — combined made more money than 2129 Iowa farmers.
This may seem like a storm in an Iowa cornfield, but it underlines issues that are close to the heart of one of the most grievous problems in the world as a whole, including New Zealand.
The information that had offended some of the magazine’s advertisers was publicly available on the internet, so why were these plutocrats so upset? I did the arithmetic, and it seems that each of those CEOs was, on average, earning 710 times as much as the average Iowa farmer.
The usual argument to justify such disparity is that it is simply a reward for their hard work and enterprise. So, if the CEOs work x times as hard as Iowa farmers, and have y times the ability, could x times y = 710? I doubt it.
Martin Hanson Nelson
