[astrodust]

Certainly things were far from ideal in the 1950s, but pay equity was still a thing then. The CEO of the biggest corporation weren't be making thousands of times more than the people in the factories assembling the products.

Until around 1980 when things started to get a little crazy, or 1990 when they started to get intensely crazy, CEO pay was around 20-40 times that of the average worker. Now, given that a lot of manufacturing is out-sourced to countries where dollars per day is the norm and a CEO's salary of $50M a year is not abnormal, it may be that the disparity is as high as 50,000x.

It's not that the money isn't out there, it's just being concentrated to a dangerous degree.

[wnewman]

Remember that it's not a good idea to equate "didn't have thousands of times the taxable income [in the 1950s]" with "didn't make thousands of times more" except for the purpose of misleading people. Comparing taxable income then to taxable income now is a mistake, because it was a time of 90% tax rates and not coincidentally a time of people moving heaven and earth to get their compensation in any form other than taxable income.

[astrodust]

You'd still be hard pressed to find a CEO that was earning hundreds of millions a year, even adjusted for inflation.

Billionaires like Howard Huges made their fortunes through owning stock, but these shares were not part of their pay package.