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E-book If You’re So Ethical, Why Are You So Highly Paid? : Ethics, Inequality and Executive Pay

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Penilaian

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Why do some people appear to obtain a disproportionate share of income and wealth? The French economist Thomas Piketty, in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, frames the problem in a rather old-fashioned way as a tussle between capital and labour. His main thesis is that inequality is rising because the rate of return on capital, held disproportionately by the wealthy, exceeds the rate of growth of output and income. It did this at the end of the 19th century and is doing it again at the beginning of the 21st. As a result, according to Piketty, ‘capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based’.8 This is, he believes, a most serious matter. It is hard to think otherwise. Inequality can be measured in a number of different ways, depending on whether the focus is on wealth, savings or income. Income inequality is illustrated by charting the top 1 per cent of the population’s share of total income. For Anglo-Saxon countries such as the US and UK, over the course of the 20th century this distribution shows a distinct ‘U’ shape: the level of inequality was very high at the start of the century and fell to much more moder-ate levels in the 1970s, before rising again in the 1990s and at the start of the 21st century.9The end of the 19th century in the US is described by historians as ‘the Gilded Age’, a satirical reference, after Mark Twain’s book of the same name, to the gilding of economic success that benefitted one section of the population but which masked widespread dep-rivation affecting other parts of the population. For sociologists of the period it was a pejorative term describing a time of material-istic excess combined with extreme poverty.10 The journalist and historian Simon Heffer has described the corresponding period in Britain as ‘The Age of Decadence’.11 On the European continent it is known as ‘La Belle Époque’ (‘the beautiful era’). The Gilded Age gave way to the ‘Progressive Era’ in the early 1920s, when Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson, supported by investigative journalists uch as Ida Tarbell and progressive lawyers like Louis Brandeis, challenged the industrial ‘trusts’ created by wealthy and powerful businessmen like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, who established monopolies over railroads, oil refining and steel production, aided by financiers such as J.P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon. At the same time, social reformers like Jane Addams lobbied hard to improve the conditions of the working classes and to reduce poverty.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

174.4 PEP i

Penerbit

London : LSE Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

198 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781909890954

Klasifikasi

174.4

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Business Ethics

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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