The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

by James Howard Kunstler

Indeed, the middle class in America was never broader. Differences in pay scales from the very top to the bottom in American life at the mid-twentieth century were amazingly democratic by today’s standards. From 1947 to 1968, the wage inequality between top executives and lowly workers actually dropped steadily. In the 1960s, automobile assembly line workers made more money than college professors. In 1960, the pay of company CEOs was on average forty-one times the pay of the company workers; by the year 2000 the multiple for CEO pay reached 531 times the pay of a worker.