What amazes me is the public’s blasé acceptance of the salaries of sports stars, compared to its low regard for superstars in business and finance. ... Half of all NBA players’ annual salaries exceed $2 million, more than five times the threshold for the top 1% of household incomes in the United States. ... Lin’s salary, at $800,000, is the NBA’s “minimum wage” for a second-season player ...I did a little math. Lin's "minimum wage," given an 82 game season, is $9,756 per game, which itself is 48 minutes. So that is equivalent to $12,195.12/hour for game time (assuming Lin plays the entire game, which he doesn't). By contrast, the current regular minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25/hour.
One can account for and perhaps justify these differences in various ways. But I've also often wondered about the same phenomenon: society seems to approve of extremely high compensation for celebrities and sports figures but to disapprove of the same for people in other professions.
Discrepancies in pay are often framed today in terms of justice, with the implication that disparities themselves (i.e., [widely] unequal portions) are not right. That is definitely one way to think about it, but I'm not sure that is the only or the best way to think about differences in compensation.
