Income Inequality and the Corrupt CEO Compensation System
Life in Paradise on a Shoestring
English - September 06, 2023 04:00 - 17 minutes - 12.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 17 ratingsPersonal Journals Society & Culture Places & Travel travel moving relocation offshore midlife reinvention lifestyle retirement expat living overseas Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In celebration of Labor Day, in the USA this episode is devoted to the workers of the world. Dawn shares information and data from the US, but the trend she discusses isn’t limited to that country. There's a good reason we see so much labor unrest, with union workers striking, non-union workers organizing and pretty much all workers falling behind economically.
Dawn examines the growth of CEO pay where compensation of the top CEOs has increased 1,322.2% from 1978 to 2020. Top CEO compensation grew roughly 60% faster than stock market growth during the same period and far exceeded the 18.0% growth in a typical worker’s pay. During the pandemic the dramatic increase in CEO compensation was obscene. While millions were out of work, CEOs’ pay shot up 18.9% in 1 year.
The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 21-to-1 in 1965. It peaked at 366-to-1 in 2000. In 2020 the ratio was 351-to-1. The makeup of CEO compensation is shifting away from stock options, to stock awards. Vested stock awards and exercised stock options totaled $20.1 million in 2020 and accounted for 83.1% of CEO pay.
Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages that have grown much faster than the stock market, typical workers salaries, college graduates, and even the top 0.1%. What can be done?
Listen and discover:
1. How primates (including humans) are hard wired for fairness and what happens when it is removed in scientific experiments
2. Why we should care about income and economic inequality and how it impacts society.
3. Policy considerations to fix the corrupt CEO compensation system.
4. What you can do at the individual level to make a difference and minimize the damage.
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Other episodes you'll enjoy:
Change, Work, Jobs, Money or Your Life? August Book Review Episode
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