CEO pay hasn't risen much lately

America's top executives made less in 2021 than in 2000

Monday evening, the Working Families Party posted this tweet arguing on behalf of a minimum wage increase:¹

If the minimum wage had continued to rise with workers’ productivity (like it did from the 1940s until the 1970s), today it would be over $22/hr. Instead, it's stuck at $7.25/hr and hasn't budged for 14 years. Instead, CEO pay has grown 1,460%.

The numbers are from a 2022 report by Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra for the Economic Policy Institute titled “CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978,” which offers two different data series for assessing CEO pay.

The 1,460% figure cited in the tweet is from the one that seems methodologically unsound to me. The other (more reasonable, in my opinion) approach finds that CEO pay has grown “only” 1,050% since 1978. This is also a very large number, so I wondered why a think tank would use a finding from a more dubious methodology — 1,050% is already a shockingly steep increase in CEO pay.

I think the answer is this: While the latter method of measuring CEO pay does show a huge increase since 1978, it shows no increase at all since 2000.