25 HEDGE FUND MANAGERS GET MORE THAN ALL THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHERS IN US

“When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called ‘financial professionals’ (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on). These are the people that [Thomas] Piketty terms ‘supermanagers,’ and he estimates that together they account for over half of the people in the one percent.

“The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year. As one famous statistic has it, last year the top twenty-five hedge fund managers together earned more than all the kindergarten teachers in America did.”

James Surowiecki, “Why the Rich Are So Much Richer,” in the New York Review, September 24, 2015, pp: 32-36.