Somebody loan me a dime

My sister Shakezula, J., has already taken quasi-judicial notice of Ruth Marcus’s weirdly confused and confusing whinging about how Clarence Thomas in particular and federal judges in general are supposedly underpaid, but I found that column so inspirational that I wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.

First, for some reason Marcus thinks that, although it doesn’t make sense to pay Clarence Thomas what partners at big law firms make, it does make sense to pay him what law school deans make, because . . . this part of the column was apparently inadvertently deleted via an editing error by an unpaid intern, because it’s missing.

Also missing is any discussion of what law school deans make, which let me tell you a little story about that. When I was a law student at the University of Michigan in the late 1980s, the dean — Lee Bollinger, who was later paid approximately two thirds of the gross national product of Bulgaria to be president of Columbia, but that’s another story — was making about $275,000 per year in 2022 dollars, which is a whole lot of money, but slightly less than half of what the dean of the same law school was getting paid last year ($577,000 — again these figures are in constant inflation adjusted dollars).

That’s a pretty typical salary these days for a law school dean at a fancy school, although deans at far less fancy schools sometimes make as much or more. For instance the law school dean at my employer, the University of Colorado, makes about $475,000 or so, despite being indescribably terrible at her job, to the extent she does it at all, which is barely, but that’s another story.

Now law school dean salaries, like salaries of other top university administrators, have skyrocketed in real terms over the past generation, because the top administrators in American higher ed pretty much end up setting their own salaries these days, with eminently predictable results. Meanwhile, the salaries of the people who do the teaching at American colleges and universities are on average far lower than they were 50 years ago, which in turn is a perfect illustration of the value theory of labor, which is that the compensation for work in America today tends toward an exact inverse correlation with its social value.

So Ruth Marcus’s argument is apparently that Clarence Thomas should get paid as much as law school deans, because law school deans make way more money than they did a generation ago — actually I’m pretty sure she has no idea this is the case, but whatever — and . . . I mean there isn’t even an argument here. It’s just random opinionating based on literally nothing, but I guess that’s her job, which I would be very curious to learn what she’s paid to do — I have literally no idea what a full-time op-ed columnist at a fancy newspaper gets paid these days, but the value theory of labor would predict something like two billion dollars, roughly.

Here’s the relative ratios of the salaries of the highest paid player in major league baseball and the president of the United States.

1878: Rutherford B. Hayes was paid 1251% more than Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson ($50,000 to $3,700).

1931: Babe Ruth was paid 6.7% more than Herbert Hoover. When journalists confronted Ruth with this then-shocking fact, he replied “Well I had a better year.”

Between 1933 and 1948 the president made more than the highest paid MLB player in every year.

In 1949, Harry Truman and Joe DiMaggio both made $100,000. A story: When DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe, he took her to Japan for their honeymoon. While they were there — this was just after DiMaggio had retired — a general asked Marilyn to pop over to Korea to do a show for the troops. She asked him if that would be OK, and he said it’s your honeymoon, do what you want. So she went, and when she came back she said, “Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.” And he said, “yes I have.”

After DiMaggio, no baseball player made as much as the president again until Willie Mays earned $5,000 more than JFK in 1963. Mays also had a better year.

Moving right along, the highest salary in MLB this year was Justin Verlander’s $43.3 million, which is 107,000% more than Joe Biden is making, which is probably why nobody wants to be president anymore. BTW Shohei Ohtani’s putative salary of $70,000,000 next season is really only like $49,000,000 in real dollars, since $68,000,000 of it is deferred for ten years (I’m using a 4% discount rate to calculate present value).