“The lack of awareness of the gap in CEO to unskilled worker pay — which in the U.S. people estimate to be 30 to 1 but is in fact 350 to 1 — likely reduces citizens’ desire to take action to decrease that gap,” says Norton.
.. He also emphasizes that “many of the heated debates about whether CEO pay should be capped or the minimum wage increased are debates based on an extreme lack of knowledge about the true state of affairs. In other words, both liberals and conservatives fail to accurately estimate the actual current gaps in our pay.
Crossing Class Lines
We found that friends from different class backgrounds spent less time together, talked less often and got into more arguments, compared to friends from the same class background.
.. Class differences are associated with a lower capacity of friends to engage with each other during daily interactions and less emotional connection between new acquaintances.
Wealth without workers, workers without wealth
The digital revolution is bringing sweeping change to labour markets in both rich and poor worlds
First, the rise of machine intelligence means more workers will see their jobs threatened. The effects will be felt further up the skill ladder, as auditors, radiologists and researchers of all sorts begin competing with machines. Technology will enable some doctors or professors to be much more productive, leaving others redundant.
Second, wealth creation in the digital era has so far generated little employment. Entrepreneurs can turn their ideas into firms with huge valuations and hardly any staff. Oculus VR, a maker of virtual-reality headsets with 75 employees, was bought by Facebook earlier this year for $2 billion. With fewer than 50,000 workers each, the giants of the modern tech economy such as Google and Facebook are a small fraction of the size of the 20th century’s industrial behemoths.
Inequality in America
From 1990 to 2000, productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.1 percent, and workers’ compensation rose by 1.5 percent. In the period from 2000 to 2009, workers’ annual productivity rate rose 2.5 percent, but raises got smaller, with compensation rising by only 1.1 percent annually. In practical terms, this means that a worker whose productivity was substantially higher in 2000-2010 than in 1990-2000 – raising his employer’s profit margin – received a smaller raise despite his improved performance.
.. The authors argue that import competition is the driving factor:
“Our data yield one robust correlation: that declines in payroll shares are more severe in industries that face larger increases in competitive pressures from imports.” This accounts for “3.3 percentage points of the 3.9 percentage-point decline in the U.S. payroll share over the past quarter century.”
.. One of the most striking findings in the CNBC/Burson-Marsteller survey is that corporations and the free market are viewed far more favorably in developing countries, where capitalism is just emerging, than in advanced countries.
On a basic question, “How favorable are you toward corporations?” the general public in emerging economies was markedly favorable, 72-24, while those in advanced economies were far more ambivalent, 52-40.