The Lucrative Revolving Door

For an economist, serving as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the President of the United States may be as good as it gets. Pols and pundits routinely hang on your every word.
But what can come next, after Council of Economic Advisers service, can certainly be far more lucrative. An enterprising former Council chair can count on oodles of invitations to serve on corporate boards of directors, the panels that determine, among other things, how much CEOs take home.
Michael Jay Boskin served as a George H.W. Bush Council of Economic Advisers chair. Laura D’Andrea Tyson chaired the Council for Bill Clinton. Both have done mighty well as corporate directors — and mighty well for the CEOs they serve.
Between, 2008 and 2012, Boskin picked up $4.7 million as a corporate director, not bad for attending a few board meetings every year. Tyson pocketed just over $3 million. Boskin’s CEOs averaged $68.2 million in the last of those years, Tyson’s $16.5 million.

Tidbits like these abound in Pay Pals, a fascinating new interactive online resource from the Huffington Post and the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Pay Pals lets Web surfers discover just how much the directors of America’s top 100 corporations are paying themselves and their chiefs.

Corporations, in a sense, are people. These people.

from here