The meritocracy is a lie: The wild myths that allow CEOs, hedge funders and the 1 percent to outearn us all
"This fabricated logic is a substitute for clear thought. As I have shown, large corporations have increased their profits and stock prices through their influence over the basic rules of the “free market”—property, market power, contract, bankruptcy, and enforcement. A growing portion of the compensation of top corporate executives and Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity managers—who together constitute the majority of the top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners—turn on these rising profits and stock prices. To this must be added the political influence of corporate executives and Wall Street traders and managers over specific rules pertaining to fraud, conflicts of interest, insider trading, and limited liability, which also affect their compensation. An analysis of their after-tax incomes would reveal their growing influence over the effective tax rates they pay as well, but my focus here is on their more consequential and less understood roles in shaping the basic rules of the game. As I hope I make clear, the current incentives operating on the richest members of society are not at all necessary in order to get them to do the work they do, and those incentives do not in any meaningful way reflect the social value of their work relative to the value of the work that others do."
