The median pay for the top 100 highest-paid CEOs at America’s publicly traded companies was a handsome $13.9 million in 2013. That’s a 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new Equilar pay study for The New York Times.
These types of jumps in executive compensation may have more of an effect on our widening income inequality than previously thought. A new book that’s the talk of academia and the media, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a 42-year-old who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, shows that two-thirds of America’s increase in income inequality over the past four decades is the result of steep raises given to the country’s highest earners.
This week, Bill talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, about Piketty’s “magnificent” new book.
“What Piketty’s really done now is he said, ‘Even those of you who talk about the 1 percent, you don’t really get what’s going on.’ He’s telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth.”
Krugman adds: “We’re seeing inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagined we’re nothing like.”
Paul Krugman is an American economist and journalist who received the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in economic geography and in identifying international trade patterns. He was also known for his op-ed column in The New York Times.
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1 Comment
We are already a highly unequal society and also a society of an oligarchy that is growing by leaps and bounds. We are already a society of inherited wealth that is becoming more and more entrenched in which this elite level of society is not taxed enough in which the burden of taxation is placed upon the middle class, working class, poor, and marginalized, thus maximizing the injustice and inequities and making it increasingly difficult to create a society with a social orientation like countries such as Denmark, Holland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.