[wpietri]

CEOs are also the ones setting things up so that everything important is in the hands of the CEO, which just happens to justify their spiraling pay. Can you imagine if we ran countries that way? The president/emperor/whatever keeps hoovering up more power, which then justifies giving them more and more of the wealth?

Capitalists talk a lot about the power of marketplaces, but internally companies are little feudal empires with ongoing wars of succession. And as The Economist points out, actual marketplace competition is in decline, so there's little in the way of external checks. Especially given that CEO tenure has dropped dramatically, meaning that the correlation between CEO pay and CEO value delivery has also dropped.