Everyone Agrees: CEOs Should Be Paid Less

Pacific Standard:

The longest lasting impact of the Occupy movement might just be the conflict between the “99 Percent” and the “One Percent”—the term that has come to symbolize the vast wealth inequality that exists in this country. As it turned out, the one percent is something of a misnomer. The top 0.01 percent of Americans actually control the majority of wealth, and that very top slice is growing wealthier faster than anyone else in the economy

The discrepancy between the one percent and 0.01 percent highlights both the negative branding of the idea of the one percent and the fact that our perceptions of inequality often don’t line up with reality. We tend to think the economy is more equal than it is, as a viral infographic video pointed out. In the video, it’s shown that 92 percent of Americans, in a study, chose an ideal wealth distribution that looks relatively even throughout the spectrum, in which the top 20 percent held about a third of the overall wealth. Americans thought that things were less equal than the ideal, with the top 20 percent holding over half of all wealth. Yet in reality, the final bar graph showed, the top 20 percent held over 80 percent of wealth.

Read the whole story: Pacific Standard