ABSTRACT
One rough gauge of inequality is to compare the annual salary of CEOs—the bosses—to the money earned by” average workers.” Newspaper articles dive into the reasons for such lucrative pay, from the public venerating the solo exploits of top CEOs to a corporate edition of“keeping up with the Joneses.” But in terms of understanding our inequality measures, the CEO is really a standin for the general population of high earners like athletes and movie stars. In 2016, Stanford University published the results of a study which examined how the American population viewed CEOs at major corporations. One advantage of talking about inequality the way is that it avoids what was an arbitrary dividing line between CEOs and those lumped together as everyone else. The housing market bubble burst was followed by a financial crisis and the issue of income inequality became a prominent topic.
