Barrick Gold Corp. has agreed to revamp its executive compensation after shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a pay package of $12.9 million for chairman John Thornton. Considering that Barrick’s share price has declined 75 per cent over the past five years and 20 per cent in the past year since Thornton was appointed, such a reaction is not unreasonable.

I fully appreciate that executives are evaluated by many measures, and it’s quite possible a leader whose company is losing money may be doing a great job under the circumstances. Nonetheless, there something is amiss when a company that lost $2.85 billion in the last quarter alone and $2.91 billion in 2014 pays its top executives millions.

To be honest, I find it hard to justify that anyone, no matter how successful, should take home $13 million a year – and I strongly believe in free markets and capitalism. But while it’s foreign to many, Judaism stresses the importance of limits, modesty and restraint. It’s not just the amount that’s excessive – it’s the gap between those who occupy corner offices and those who are the nuts and bolts of the organization. Such a salary represents 250 times that of the average worker. A generation ago, the multiple would have been more like 20. This income gap, with greater amounts of income controlled by fewer and fewer people, can be unhealthy for society as a whole. This problem is acute in Israel, which has one of highest rates of income inequality in the western world.

All this makes the actions of Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, even more remarkable. He has introduced a minimum wage of $70,000 for all 120 of his employees. This will mean raises for 70 and the doubling of salaries for 30 “lucky” employees. He based the amount on a study on happiness co-authored by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (who taught at Hebrew University for many years) that found emotional well-being rises as salary increases up to, but not beyond, $75,000. “We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction, but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being,” he wrote.

Perhaps even more astounding, the salary increases were largely paid by Price himself, who took a pay cut from $1-million to – you guessed it – $70,000. As he noted “The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous. It’s absurd.” It should come as no surprise that his company donates 10 per cent of its profits to charity.

Though many will try to deny it, the “debate” surrounding proper compensation ultimately boils down to whether one sees money as an end in itself or a means to an end. Those in the former camp will seek to maximize their earnings, in ways that are perfectly legal and may even be compelling if one only evaluates the contributions of the person. If one, however, takes a broader view and considers the impact of one’s earnings on others, one will be quite content with somewhat less. Try as we may to ignore what we instinctively know and what research shows, beyond the first $75,000 or so, money just can’t buy happiness. Our sages expressed this sentiment with their well-known teaching, “Who is wealthy? One who is happy with his lot.”

Many Jews pray three times a day for material blessings, which are wonderful. But our emphasis on modesty ipso facto means that those who have great material blessings are meant to share them with others. Think of how many people would benefit if a corporate executive took a pay cut from $10 million to $5 million instead of laying off 75 workers. 

We need more Dan Prices – if only to offer some counterbalance to what all too often goes on in executive suites, and to share happiness with many.