Previously published on BillMoyers.com.
The median pay for the top 100 highest-paid CEOs at America's publicly traded companies was a handsome $13.9 million in 2013. That's a 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new Equilar pay study for The New York Times.
These types of jumps in executive compensation may have more of an effect on our widening income inequality than previously thought. A new book that's the talk of academia and the media, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a 42-year-old who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, shows that two-thirds of America's increase in income inequality over the past four decades is the result of steep raises given to the country's highest earners.
This week, I talk with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, about Piketty's "magnificent" new book.
"What Piketty's really done now is he said, 'Even those of you who talk about the 1 percent, you don't really get what's going on.' He's telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth."
Krugman adds: "We're seeing inequalities that will be transferred across generations. We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagined we're nothing like."
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