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[Aqizzar]

Actually, thinking about it, it's not a mathematically inaccurate statement.  If you've got ten guys, nine of them making $100 (or a hundred million, whatever), and one guy making $10 (or "technically" $1 annually like a lot of Detroit CEOs are pretending now), you'd have nine people out of ten making above average pay.

I guess my real question now, is, how much "earning" is actually being counted, since most CEOs make vastly more money in dividends and earnings and "travel expenses" rather than straight pay (I don't even know what bonus packages count as).

[mainiac]

Average is a vague term.  In this case the more precise definition would be "median" because it's 90% of companies that intend for their CEO's to have median or above salary, not mean or above.

[Leafsnail]

They did specify median in the article.

[RedKing]

There's so many accounting tricks to hide true compensation that it's almost impossible to tell. Meg Whitman, our new Glorious leader, supposedly has a salary of $1. But is due something like $11 million in the first year in various compensation packages, and she has a guaranteed $10 million+ severance package in her contract. I don't even have guaranteed retirement benefits, much less a severance package. 


It's also worth noting in that WP article that average annual earnings for the rest of us have, when adjusted for inflation, declined since 1964 even as CEO pay has quintupled. So where you had about a 26:1 ratio in 1964, you now have a 173:1 ratio. I'd be curious to see if anyone has crunched the numbers to determine the income ratios between aristocracy and peasantry in pre-revolutionary France or pre-Chartist Britain.

EDIT: Well, it's a lot more complicated to compare because of difference in social stratification, percentages of the population in each class, etc.

But by a rough comparison based on this paper (warning: serious math), we weren't there yet in 2000, but we were beginning to creep up around Hanoverian levels. A little more, and we'll be up around the inequality levels of Georgian England. Beyond that, the Roman Empire and then France just prior to the Revolution. I'd be fascinated to see the numbers for the US updated to modern data, but I haven't the chops to crunch those equations.