Peter F. Drucker Boxed Set (8 Books) (The Drucker Library)

CHAPTER FOUR

Is Executive Pay Excessive?

MEASURED IN CONSTANT AFTER-TAX DOLLARS, incomes of corporation executives in the United States have been going down fairly steadily for the last thirty years. And the gap between the after-tax real income of top management people and of all other employees, from rank and file up through middle management, has been shrinking rather than widening during the same period.

Yet almost no one knows the facts, and almost no one believes them. What is widely believed is that executive compensation has been going up so fast as to have become “excessive,” and that the inequality of incomes in U.S. corporations and ...