Stop Obsessing Over Exorbitant CEO Pay

… But as New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter noted recently, claiming that wealth inequality is unambiguously harmful is more about ideology than evidence. He cites the struggles of Harvard scholar Christopher Jencks, a leading chronicler of the middle class, to complete a planned book on income inequality. After years of research, Jencks was convinced that the only true statement about whether and how income inequality harms society is “It’s hard to tell.” Progressive economist Jared Bernstein has also found that we can’t prove the assumption that inequality leads to slower growth, given available evidence. It may be true, Bernstein wrote, but we do not have enough concrete proof.

The work of Jencks and Bernstein complicates the neat narrative of robber barons and a new Gilded Age harming the middle class. Because those views lack black-and-white simplicity, however, they tend to receive less attention. Which is a shame, because they’re probably closer to the truth.

The assumption of a causal link between excessive pay at the top and low growth and stagnant incomes fuels the drive to reframe the tax code toward greater redistribution. There is a strong moral case for that, especially insofar as massive gaps between the rich and the rest can be so insurmountable as to severely dent the idea of equality enshrined in the founding of the U.S. That said, even aggressive redistribution will not fundamentally solve what now ails us. …

… The top 100 CEOs in the survey took home a total of $1.5 billion. That’s rather nice for them, but redistributing, say, $1 billion of that would do almost nothing to help the 100 million people at the bottom of the economic pyramid in the U.S. Even if you included upper management and got to, let’s say, $100 billion, the extra income distributed across American society would barely improve living standards. Boards could mandate that, say, Larry Ellison of Oracle should be less wealthy so that Oracle employees could be more wealthy, but Oracle employees are already on the winning side of the global economic equation. They are not the ones who need help.

Let’s say then that you created an inequality tax, as Robert Shiller of Yale has proposed. That could certainly generate some extra billions, which could then be redistributed. But even there, the super-rich would only become slightly less super-rich, while those whose incomes are stagnating or those tens of millions underemployed and caught in a web of structural unemployment would see marginal improvement at best. In short, measures to reduce inequality might be modestly helpful, but they wouldn’t solve much. …

This piece highlights once again that for those truly interested in working for a just and prosperous world you have to move beyond populist "bumper-sticker" economics.