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Monday, October 10, 2022

Statistics Can Deceive

 


 Credit Suisse Research Institute has just published its broader annual census of the world's super-rich. 

The Credit Suisse analysis also shows,the United States boasts 39.2 percent of the world's millionaires.

China sits second, at 9.9 percent, with Japan third at 5.4 percent.

 53 percent of global high worth of at least $100 million call the USA home.

The Economic Policy Institute released their latest yearly update.

 Corporate chiefs at the 350 top American firms that trade on the stock market last year realized an average $27.8 million in compensation, an 11.1-percent increase over their previous year's pay and a record 399 times more than the take-home of typical American workers.

Back in 1965, top U.S. CEOs averaged just 20 times more than the annual compensation of typical American workers. In 1989, a quarter-century later, that gap was still only running 59-to-1. The gap since then has multiplied nearly seven-fold.

Overall, U.S. CEO compensation has increased 1,460 percent since 1978, adjusting for inflation. The pay increase for typical U.S. workers over that same time span? Just 18 percent.

Between 1978 and 2020, the latest year with comparable stats available, the overall inflation-adjusted annual earnings of our nation's top 0.1 percent jumped 385 percent. CEO compensation during those same years, EPI notes, "grew nearly four times as fast!"

Amazon, for instance, last year generously "shared" the wealth well beyond the chief executive level. Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy ended the year up $212.7 million. But Amazon's web services chief, Adam Selipsy, had no reason to complain either. His compensation for the year: $81.4 million. David Clark, Amazon's worldwide consumer chief, enjoyed a lucrative year as well. His pay totaled $56 million.

Amazon's most typical warehouse workers, meanwhile, took home $31,705 last year.

The pay gap between U.S. corporate executives and workers gives no sign of shrinking anytime soon. Grand concentrations of wealth, in other words, skew the statistics. 

Average personal wealth figures in top-heavy societies can look rather robust. But the typical person in these societies cannot claim anything close to those averages.

The United States last year averaged just over $579,000 in wealth per adult, almost double France's $322,000 average. But the most typical—the median—French adult held a net worth of just under $140,000, almost $50,000 more than the wealth of the most typical U.S. adult. 

Average Danes, Canadians, and Dutch adults—to give just a few more examples—last year all held less wealth than average Americans. But the wealth of the most typical adults in Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands all towered over the wealth of the most typical U.S. adults by at least 53 percent.

Opinion | American Billionaires Show US Is #1 in Creating Grotesque Inequality | Sam Pizzigati (commondreams.org)

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