> This article compares the wages not of all CEOs, but of 300 of the best paid ones.
That is not true. The report analyzes “publicly held companies with the lowest median worker pay.” They describe the sample probably a dozen or so times in the report.
> tiny fraction of one side to millions
You are making this out to be a random sample of irrelevant companies. These are publicly traded companies of which there are a few thousand in total. The list includes companies such as Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Estee Lauder, etc.
Me: "This article compares the wages not of all CEOs, but of 300 of the best paid ones."
You: "That is not true."
The article: "Report on 300 top US companies...."
Tell me again this is not 300 of the best paid CEOs? After all, the fact is CEO average pay is only 212k. BLS is a much better source than the Guardian for salary data, after all.
>You are making this out to be a random sample of irrelevant companies.
It is most certainly not a random sample of companies, otherwise the result would mimic the actual data from BLS. This is specially selected data to get this result.
It is a cherry picked sample of the very top end of the CEO salaries (300 of them out of over 200,000 of them that exist) compared to workers, but not all workers, only those that are among the lowest paid, again, to reach a shocking headline that creates outrage.
Here's [1] the actual report. Note in the report they compare part time worker wages to fulltime CEOs - not an hourly rate or something a tiny bit more defensible - for example, they compare an annual wage of $224 (yes, you read that correct) for a part time worker at NuSkin to the CEO wage of $4m. They repeat this type of nonsense throughout the report. The dishonesty in the report to me is astounding - and it explains how they get the numbers to drive their headlines.
Comparing a tiny fraction of top values from one dataset to all of another dataset is not exactly a valid statistical technique. Doing everything you can at each step to widen the result to get what you want is beyond simple stats misunderstanding - it's nutjob agenda driven lying.
If someone did this to claim global warming was not real, or any of a zillion other false claims, people would (and should) cry foul.
If I did this, picking the top 300 employee wages in the country (all well into the millions) and compared to all CEOs (avg pay 200k), obtaining the claim that workers make many multiples of CEO wages, you'd rightfully cry foul.
So why the pitchforks and intellectual dishonesty when the data is manipulated this way? Because it gets a result you want to see?
The reason I don't find it so ridiculous is that 1. The income gap from top to bottom directly correlates with violence/unrest and 2. These corporations are usually huge conglomerates with immense reach and power.
So you're ok with lying as long as it matches your likes?
This is how we get terrible public policy - enough people believe the fake items of the day elect people that act on those items, "solving" the wrong problems, allocating resources inefficiently, and creating more problems.
Why not simply call for accurate information to help people make better decisions?
As to unrest, which causes more, social inequality or people acting out after being fed bad information? Which caused more attacks and deaths in the US over the past 4 years? Which causes more damage to the planet?
I am definitely not okay with lying. I didn't read the article :) but from your description it didn't sound like lying.
> As to unrest, which causes more, social inequality or people acting out after being fed bad information? Which caused more attacks and deaths in the US over the past 4 years? Which causes more damage to the planet?
I don't know which is worse. I would say people definitely need given proper context, but social inequality is probably the problem I would fix first if I had the choice.
>social inequality is probably the problem I would fix
I would too, but I would deal with based on correctly sourced evidence. The majority of the anti-inequality articles I see are filled with bad math, bad analysis, and would lead to solutions that end up hurting more people.
Burning down things for which one does not understand the reasons they work the current way is a sure way to get worse outcomes. Two examples - tons of people wanted to burn down banking during the 2008 crisis, but those naive solutions would have vastly hurt the least able. Naive ham-handed making a fed min wage $15/hr would put (middle CBO estimate) over a million people out of work, because they could not add $15/hr in value to an employer. A better solution is using targeted assistance of scarce tax money to help people that need it and not just shovel it anywhere.
But the layman seems to fill themselves with outrage by poorly written or analyzed articles and then brings pitchforks out, electing people with bad understanding or reason, and we're all worse off.
Also, the poor in the US are vastly richer than pretty much any other poor on the planet. Would you lower the US standard of living, including making our poor poorer, to help the rest of the planet? (or replace US with whatever country you're in).
Comparing the top tiny fraction of one side to millions on the other is sure to get headlines for outrage.
BLS lists CEO pay avg as $200k. [1]
I suspect if you compared the top 300 compensated employees you'd find they get massive multiples of median CEO pay too.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm