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Income inequality

Wednesday 24th of April 2024

Income inequality The 25 highest-earning hedge fund managers in the United States took home a total of $21.15 billion in compensation in 2013. New York Times, May 6, 2014 — average family size (AFS) = 2.54 people; median family income (MFI) = $51,017; $21.15 billion = 414,567 times MFI; 414,567 times AFS = 1,053,000 people — $21.15 billion divided by 25 people = $846,000,000 average compensation; $846,000,000 = 16,583 times MFI; 16,583 times AFS = 42,120 people © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington, found that chief executive pay compared with the earnings of average workers had surged from a multiple of 20 in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013. New York Times, December 8, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality $10,400,000,000 2013 combined income of 4 highest paid hedge fund managers $8,300,000,000 2013 combined income of 158,000 kindergarten teachers Lowdown, February, 2015 — $10,400,000,000 / 4 = $2,600,000,000, the average head fund manager's income $8,300,000,000 / 158,000 = $52,532, the average kindergarten teacher's income $2,600,000,000 / $52,532 = 49,494 times the average teacher's income © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality According to new data from research firm Equilar, the median compensation – without perks – for C-suite executives at Fortune 100 companies jumped nearly 15% to $7.4 million in fiscal year 2015 from $6.5 million in 2013. Over the same period, perks jumped 21.6% to a median value of $126,550. Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Advocates of free enterprise like to say hard work should be rewarded, but in today's corporate culture, that simply isn't the case. While CEOs are often compensated, at least in part, on their companies' overall success, regular employees, who arguably are as responsible as executives for that success, are often not. According to a 2017 report … three-fourths of executives, directors and managers were given bonuses, while less than half of hourly workers were. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 25, 2017 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality All of the 10 highest-paid executives [in 2021] had compensation over $100 million, a first. Their average compensation was $330 million, the highest ever. But it's not just a few executives at the top enjoying the spoils. Underscoring how widespread the pay increases were last year, the median chief executive made $32.1 million in 2021, up 27 percent from $25.3 million in 2020 and far higher than in prepandemic years. New York Times, June 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality As in recent years, some of the highest- paid CEOs of public companies weren’t running businesses in the S&P 500 index. Private-equity giant KKR & Co. reported paying co-CEOs Joseph Bae and Scott Nuttall compensation valued at $559.6 million and $523.1 million, respectively. Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality At Yale Law school, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz. People would say with a straight face that a surgeon mother and engineer father were middle-class. In Middletown [Ohio], $160,000 is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law School, students expect to earn that amount in the first year after law school. Many of them are already worried that it won't be enough. J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The average CEO pay among the top 350 companies in 2017 was more than 300 times that of the average compensation of their workers, up from 20 times in 1965. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Between 1997 and 2007, for example, income after taxes and benefits grew by 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of U.S. households, by 65 percent for those between the 80th and 99th percentiles, and by 275 percent for the top one percent. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Britain's biggest companies paid their shareholders five times more than they spent tackling their pension deficits last year … research published on Tuesday showed that FTSE 100 companies with “defined benefit” schemes, which offer a guaranteed income in retirement, paid £71bn in dividends last year, compared with £13.3bn in pension contributions. … nearly a third of FTSE 100 companies could have wiped out their pension deficits in 2015 with the cash they handed to shareholders. Financial Times, August 16, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality CEOs in general are paid far too much … Jesus Christ himself isn't worth 500 times his median worker's pay. Abigail Disney © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The CEOs of the fifty firms that laid off the most workers during the depths of the Great Recession took home nearly $12 million (on average) in 2009, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole. Ronald P. Formisano, Plutocracy in America © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality CEOs' total pay has also grown consistently above inflation in that period [2014 to 2019], attracting political scrutiny. The Associated Press, using Equilar data, reported that the median pay package for the head of an S&P 500 company exceeded $12.3m in 2019, with the gap between CEOs and their workforces widening to the point where it would take the typical employee 169 years to make as much. Financial Times, June 10, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Income inequality … citizenship and income class of his parents. These two factors explain more than 80 percent of a person's income. The remaining 20 percent or less is therefore due to other factors over which individuals have no control (gender, age, race, luck) and to the factors over which they do have control (effort or hard work). Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality … a coming trial in Deleware's Chancery Court. The defendants: Tesla's … board of directors, which in January 2018 voted co-founder and CEO Elon Musk a 10-year pay package that includes a minimum wage (which he gives to charity) and 12 levels of stock options tied to market value, potenitally worth $56 billion if Tesla hits a market cap of $650 billion. (The options vest on each $50 billion in growth). … The potential award is larger than the gross domestic product of 27 nations. Robert Teitelman, Barron's, October 28, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Connecticut presents one of the starkest examples of the growth of US income inequality. In their guarded homes, Greenwich's rich have been doing very nicely: from 2009 to 2013, the income of the state's top 1% grew 17.2%. The incomes of everyone else dropped by 1.6%. The Guardian, March 27, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Discovery Inc.’s David Zaslav, at nearly $247 million, had the highest 2021 pay disclosed so far among the CEOs of S&P 500 companies who served the full year. Mr. Zaslav’s pay was nearly 3,000 times the $82,964 that the company reported paying its median worker last year, up from a multiple of 1,511 in 2018. … The second-highest paid CEO so far in the S&P 500 was Amazon.com Inc.’s Andy Jassy, who was awarded compensation valued at  nearly $213 million, narly all in retricted stock. That was nearly 6,500 times the median Amazon worker, who made $32,855 in 2021. Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch in the two preceding decades, about half of all families experienced some decline in income. Robert B. Reich, The System © 2021 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A far simpler and much bolder approach [to reducing income inequality] … would be to set a new income maximum as a multiple of the existing minimum wage Any income above that multiple would face a tax of 100 percent. … A “maximum wage” set in this fashion would immediately intertwine the economic fates of society's poorest and society's most privileged. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Figures from the New York comptrollers's office showed the average bonus [of the city's traders and bankers] rose by 2 per cent to $172,860 in 2014 even though the industry was 4.5 per cent less profitable than a year earlier. … The shrunken securities industry accounts for less than 5 per cent of New York City's private sector jobs but 21 per cent of wages paid in the city. Financial Times, March 12, 2015 (2014 average annual NYC wage = $63,460; analysts' average = $250,000 to $750,000; $172,860 bonus = 2.7 times NYC avg. wage) © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality For the first time, all 10 of the top-paid C.E.O.s on Equilar's list received at least $50 million last year. New York Times, May 17, 2015 [Equilar, Inc. analyzes executive pay] — $50,000,000 per year = $136,986 per day = $5,708 per hour = $95 per minute = $1.59 per second ASSUMING they worked every second of the year © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequalty From 1993 to 2017, the average real family incomes of the bottom 99 percent of the U.S. population grew by only 15.5 percent, while the incomes of the top 1 percent of American families grew by 95.5 percent. “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century,” Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality From 2004 to 2016, the average annual wage for chief executives in the coal industry grew as much as five times faster than those of lower-paying jobs in the industry, like construction or truck and tractor operator jobs. Executive pay averaged $200,000, up 60 percent from $125,000, while paychecks for truck and tractor operators rose just 15 percent, to $43,770 from $38,060. … The data excludes bonuses, share options and other perks, which often inflate executive compensation – and the pay gap – many times more. New York Times, May 2, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A generation ago, mainstream economists believed that greater equality  fostered dysfunction. Any attempts to restrain income at the top, this mainstream held, would reduce incentives to save and invest and throttle the economic growth necessary to “lift all boats.” But that mainstream has reversed course and now sees inequality as more likely to sink boats than lift them. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality High-income families now spend, on average, seven times as much each year on education as lower- income families, up from four times in the 1970s … From 2007 to 2011, while the broader economy was weak, enrollment at private schools with with tuition averaging $28,340 jumped 36 percent … New York Times, March 22, 2013, in an article about a competitive polo team being created at the recently founded and pretentiously named Oxbridge Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, which will train at Wall Street Farm, a nearby riding school © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A hundred thousand dollars. Meredith Whitney, Wall Street analyst and consultant, when asked about her hourly rate © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality I am “just” upper middle class. But my life is one of late-Roman decadence next to that of the median earner. If you are a corporate lawyer (not even a partner) so is yours.  If you send your children to a private school, or live in the catchment area of an acclaimed state one, so, most likely, is yours. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality I was once told by the head of a prestigious think tank … [that its] board was very unlikely to fund any any work that had income  or wealth inequality  in its title. Yes, they would finance anything that had to do with poverty alleviation, but inequality was an altogether matter. Why? Charity is a good thing … But inequality is different: Every mention of it raises in fact the issue of the appropriateness or legitimacy of my income. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Imagine this: you are given one dollar every second. At that rate, after one minute, you would have 60 dollars. After twelve days, you would be a millionaire – something beyond the wildest dreams of most people on Earth. But how long would it take to become a billionaire? Well, at that rate, it would take almost 32 years. Linda McQuaig, Billionaires' Ball  © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality In Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, the median hourly wage for software developers is $64 an hour, and from $11 to $14 for groundskeepers, janitors and security guards … Eighty-eight percent of computer jobs provide paid sick days, compared to 41 percent of building and grounds- cleaning jobs. Three to 4 percent of tech employees are black or Latino, and about 75 percent of janitorial and maintenance workers are. New York Times, March 26, 2013, © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality In the past three decades, CEO pay  “has exploded” to a ratio of 354 to 1, but their fellow citizens thought it to be about 30 to 1. Ronald P. Formisano, Plutocracy in America  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality In 2009 the richest twenty-five hedge-fund investors earned more that $25 billion, rougly six times as much as all the chief executives of companies in the S&P 500 stock index combined. Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal  © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality In 2018, the median household income for a black family was $41,361, having grown 3.4 per cent over the previous decade, according to the latest US Census Bureau data. This compared with a median income $70,642 for non-Hispanic whites which had grown 8.8 per cent since the 2008 crisis. Financial Times, June 4, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The inflection point on the economic scale comes much earlier than you think. Something dramatic happens between, say, £30,000 a year and £130,000: a sharper change in the texture of life than occurs between the second number and a million. The first jump affects what you can do. The second tends to affect merely how.  The upper middle class can rent in nice districts of world-class cities. The rich can buy there. The average can do neither. The upper middle class can fly to another continent. The rich can fly business. The average must plan and econo- mise to do either. Having passed through the same universities, the upper middle class and the rich are often of a cultural feather. … How often does either befriend a nongraduate Band 5 NHS nurse? Or marry one? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Dec. 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality It can take a teacher, with a degree, 11 years to reach QuickTrip's starting salary for full-time employees with just a high school diploma. NewsOn6, Tulsa, Oklahoma [QuickTrip is a chain of convenience stores headquartered in Tulsa] © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A July report from the Economic Policy Institute found that the chief executive officers of America's largest companies made an average of $15.6 million in compensation in 2016, or 271 times the annual average pay of ordinary workers. Although that gap has narrowed over the past few years, it's still astronomically larger than the 20 times recorded in 1965. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 25, 2017 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The largest gap between chief executive and workers in the survey was at Amazon, where this spring a union won a battle to organize a warehouse for the first time. Andrew Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s chief executive last year, had pay that was 6,474 times that of the company's median employee. His compensation last year, $213 million, was the eighth highest, according to Equilar [a compensation consulting firm]. New York Times, June 25, 2022 [$213,000,000 divided by 6,474 means that the median income of an Amazon employee in 2021 was just short of $32,901] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Male computer programmers make 28 per cent more than their female counterparts in the US, after adjusting for differences between jobs and workers. That gap is four times larger than the national average, according to a recent study from Glassdoor. Financial Times, April 7, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Median pay rose to $14.2 million last year for the leaders of S&P 500 companies, up from a record $13.4 million for the same companies a year earlier, according to a  Wall Street Journal analysis of pay data for  more than half the index from MyLogIQ LLC. Most CEOs received a pay increase of 11% or more, and pay rose by at least 25% for nearly one-third of them. … CEOs at roughly half the companies were paid at least 186 times what their median worker made in 2021 … That is up from 166 times in the year before the pandemic and 156 times in 2018 Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality One's income thus crucially depends on citizenship, which in turn means (in a world of rather low international migration) place of birth. All people born in rich countries receive a location premium or a location rent; all those born in poor countries get a location penalty. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Pension gains averaged 8% of total compensation for top executives at S&P 500 companies last year, up sharply from 3% the year before … But the gains are much larger for some executives, totaling more than $1 million each for 176 executives at 89 large companies that filed proxy statements through mid-March. For those executives, pension gains averaged 30% of total pay. [which is often in the tens of millions] Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2015 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive of Viacom, the entertainment conglomerate … got $84.5 million [in compensation in 2010] , an amount that exceeds the entire 2011-12 town budget for North Haven, Connecticut. It takes a village to pay a corporate titan. Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The poorest American ventile [bottom twentieth or bottom 5%] is at the 68th percentile of the world income distribution … This means that the poorest Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world's population. People in all other (higher) U.S. ventiles are, of course, even better off, and the richest Americans belong to the top world percentile. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A rebound in returns drove up the earnings of hedge fund managers last year, with the top 25 performers raking in $15.4bn, up from $11bn in 2016. The 25 highest earners took home an average of $615m, according to an annual ranking of hedge fund managers' pay packets compiled by Institutional Investor magazine. James Simons of Renaissance Tech- nologies topped the pay list for the third straight year, earning $1.7bn, up from $1.6bn the previous year.  Financial Times, May 31, 2018 [$615m/365 = $1,684,932 per day] [$1.7bn/365 = $4,657,534 per day]  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Since 1978. the poorest 50 percent of Americans have seen their real incomes shrink, by 1 percent. By contrast, America's most affluent 1 percent, over that same span, have seen their real incomes nearly triple. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Since the 1980s the United States has embraced a pro-rich political philosophy. We do much less to reduce inequality than any other rich country. We choose to be unequal. … and we lead by example. Salvatore Babones, “America's Leading Export: Inequality” © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The shocks of the past three years have hit all countries, but they have hit emerging and developing countries particularly hard. As a result, according to Global Economic Prospects 2023, just out from the World Bank, the convergence of average incomes between poor and rich countries has stalled. Worse, it might not soon return, given the damage already done and likely to persist in the years ahead. … According to the bank,  the number of people suffering “food insecurity” (that is, on the borders of starvation) in low-income countries jumped from 56mn in 2019 to 105mn in 2022. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, January 10, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Since the early 1970s, rising income inequality and rising income instability have gone hand in hand. The gap between Richie Rich and Joe Citizen is a lot larger than it used to be, but so too is the gap between Joe Citizen in a good year and Joe Citizen in a bad year. Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Researchers in 2017 recorded 2,676 workers performing 3.8m tasks on AMT [Amazon Mechanical Turk], and found the median hourly wage was $2 an hour. Only 4 per cent earned more than $7.25 an hour. The competition is global: workers in the US earn $3.01 per hour, while those in India earn $1.41. Prolific, a UK-based crowd-work platform for surveys and market research, imposes an hourly pay floor by calculating the average time it takes workers to complete each task. But while the UK's legal minimum wage for over-25s is £8.72 an hour, Prolific's is £5 an hour. Sarah O'Connor, Financial Times, 2020/09/16, on crowd-work platforms, which let companies cut virtual jobs into tiny tasks for homeworkers © 2020 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A study of CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms found that their total compensation in 2014 averaged $16.3 million. It had grown 997 percent  since 1978 — almost double the amount of stock market growth and far more than the painfully small growth in a typical worker's pay. The $16.3 million figure amounted to 303 times  the annual compensation of the typical worker, far above the 20-to-1 ratio of 1965 or even the 87-to-1 of the middle 1990s. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Today, it is much more important, globally speaking whether you are lucky enough to be born in a rich country than whether the income class to which you belong in a rich country is high, medium or low. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The total income reported on the top 400 individual tax returns rose 20% in 2014, according to Internal Revenue Service data released Thursday. The figures reveal the concentration of earnings at the pinnacle of the income distribution, in a club that required $126.8 million of adjusted gross income to enter. That group, out of nearly 150 million tax returns in 2014, received 1.3% of income … Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2016 — 400/150,000,000 = 0.000002667 of returns 0.000002667 × 100 = 0.0002267% of returns 1.3%/0.0002267% = 4,874, therefore, avg. 400 income = 4,874 × avg. taxpayer income © 2016 Kwiple.com
Income inequality US inequality may now be so sharp, and the political process so tightly captured by top earners, that necessary reforms will not happpen — much like in Europe before the first world war. Thomas Piketty, Financial Times, March 29-30, 2014 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Income inequality We can level up incomes at the bottom of our economic order. We can level down incomes at the top. Or we can do both. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality What if each of our societies set a ceiling on the annual income any one individual could pocket — and linked this maximum to an existing wage minimum? … In any nation that linked minimum to maximum, society's richest would be able to increase their own personal income only if the incomes of society's poorest increased first. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality When the largest pay rises come from billionaires who announce they want to be beneficient, that is not a sign that the system is working — it is a sign that it is not. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, October 7, 2018, on the announcement by Jeff Bezos that he would raise Amazon's minimum wage in the U.S. to $15/hour © 2018 Kwiple.com
 
Income inequality While wages have stagnated in the rest of the economy, the average New York banker's bonus rose to $164,530 in 2013. That's on top of an average base salary of around $200,000. Wall Street bankers now make more than five times the average New York City salary, compared with less than two times the average in 1981. Salvatore Babones, Sixteen for '16 © 2016 Kwiple.com