[yummyfajitas]

The statistic you are citing doesn't say CEOs don't make 300x their workers. It says they make 300x the average worker.

Between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period. Hmm.

Did all CEOs see this raise, or just the CEOs of the top corporations (who's workers also saw raises)?

None of the statistics you cite remotely contradict the claim that between-firm inequality is the primary driver of inequality.

[Sone7]

I doubt any one but you thought I meant that CEOs make more money than 300x ALL their workers, but er, thanks for the clarification anyway.

I didn't say the statistics refute the claim, I said the article's claim is mostly based on a graph that fails to take extreme executive pay into account when discussing average worker pay. The statistics I cite back that up.

And the word you're looking for is 'whose'. Who's means ' who is'. Apostrophes can be tricky, I know, but hey - you got pedantic on me first.

[yummyfajitas]

I doubt any one but you thought I meant that CEOs make more money than 300x ALL their workers, but er, thanks for the clarification anyway.

You are completely misinterpreting me. I was not arguing against this claim at all.

The statistic you cite claims that a select set of CEOs make more than the average worker across all firms. I.e., the CEO of Goldman makes 300x more than the average worker at Goldman and Walmart combined.

It does not make any claims about inequality within forms - i.e., whether the CEO of Goldman makes 300x the average worker at Goldman.

[Sone7]

You are correct, thank you for the clarification.

I remain convinced that CEOs of Google and Goldman make hundreds of times more money than their average workers, and that if you're going to publish an article that makes such a large claim as this one, based almost entirely on average pay data, then that should be taken into account.

Did you know the CEO of Goldman made 54 million dollars in 2007? I don't know if you remember, but the next year there was a significant economic crash that caused immense hardship for a large portion of the world, and a huge amount of the blame for it was laid at Goldman's door. HBR had fuck all to say about that, or the massive global austerity protests. A few protesters yell at Google employees getting on the bus, and they're all over it drawing wild conclusions.

I point that out because it's ironic that you'd use Goldman to make that point, considering the effect they've had on inequality.

Let's be real - blaming the amount Google pays its employees for the extreme inequality in America is fucking absurd. It's misdirection, and apparently it works to an extent even on literate, mathematically educated populations, such as this one. This is deeply concerning to me.