[CWuestefeld]

Or the market was different, or they...

A really significant difference that I rarely see acknowledged in these discussions is that the means of compensation has changed drastically in the last few decades.

It used to be that executives got part of their compensation through perks like generous expense accounts, or country club memberships, or keys to the executive washroom. Changes in tax laws and other cultural norms have eliminated these as such. But the corporations still need to be able to compete for the same pool of executives, and so the money that had been going into those perks now surfaces as monetary compensation.

In other words, much of the apparent increase in salaries is actually just that part of the old-days compensation wasn't reflected as income.