RICH PAID MUCH MORE FOR THEIR WORK

“[. . . .the rise of high-end incomes in the US is still largely about labor income rather than capital income. [Thomas] Piketty’s book is, as the title suggests, largely about capital: about the way the concentration of wealth tends to reproduce itself, leading to greater and greater inequality. And this is an increasing problem in the US, particularly at the highest reaches of the income spectrum. But the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less. Corporate CEOs, for instance, are paid far more today than they were in the 1970s, while assembly line workers aren’t. And while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have [incomes at the top] risen faster than in the US.

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