CEO Pay Has Risen 1,085% Since 1978, But for Workers? Just 24%
CEO Pay Has Risen 1,085% Since 1978, But for Workers? Just 24%
CEOs at top US companies saw their pay skyrocket by 1,085% since 1978, while typical worker pay only increased by 24%
You're viewing a single thread.
Pay raise means jack all for ordinary people. Our buying power went down a lot more than 24%.
This does seem to be adjusting for inflation; according to one of the sources they cited:
From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).
That said I think there's some problems with how inflation is calculated, and the implications of the distribution of total ownership of wealth isn't really mitigated by increasing affordability of consumer goods.
So we should be paid what, 3x more? Or am I too reductive? I’m trying to understand how much we SHOULD be getting then (in 2020 btw), and now more actually, as shit got expensive af thru Covid and is still lingering today.
Dunno, not sure there's a way to conclusively pick an amount that's "fair" since any metrics for that are arbitrary. Just going by productivity vs wages and the premise that what people were paid in 1979 was what they "should" be paid given that ratio, you could say 3x, but there's a lot of assumptions there. To me the bigger story seems to be the ongoing trend of how capital keeps accumulating capital, and the share of the pie owned by regular people continues to decrease regardless of their contributions, and what that might mean for our future.
Existential crisis: Activated