US income inequality is dominated by top managers capturing historically unprecedented pay

Evidence

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010. The bulk of this increase comes from the top 1 percent, whose share rose from 9 percent to 20 percent, about half of which went to the 0.1 percent. Piketty calculates that 60–70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy is composed of managers who have succeeded in obtaining “historically unprecedented” compensation thanks to new value-maximizing incentive structures. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1755

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier argument about financialization and the extraction of value via surveillance capital — the same managerial capture dynamic appears in the firms Zuboff describes; also relates to Piketty’s broader thesis on capital concentration cited throughout social-science reading. — connects to: Officers’ share of compensation captures the highest executive tier in corporations — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 75; Industrial concentration raises top officers’ share of compensation while employment size lowers it — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 145; Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle for an article: ‘Surveillance capital as the newest chapter of managerial value capture’ — how the top 1%‘s wage growth maps onto the rise of the tech-platform executive class.

Broader Connections

• Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves #corroborates (0.85) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54
• Stock-based executive pay widened CEO-worker income gaps. #corroborates (0.85) — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 56