Does a CEO Work 1739 Times Harder Than You?
The Pitch: Economic Update for June 4th, 2026
Friends,
This week we’re talking about new studies that show worker wages losing ground to CEO pay and corporate profits, discussing a bold new policy agenda, and taking a close look at the need for national protections from heat-related workplace injuries. But first, we have to talk about how we can change America’s mind about how the economy really works.
Last week, I shared an important new piece in The Atlantic from Civic Ventures founder Nick Hanauer and Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker about a new economic paradigm called Market Humanism. In the piece, they argue that scientists, researchers, and deep thinkers working individually across disciplines have composed a body of work that, when considered together, finally offers a new economic model that upends and replaces the fatally flawed economic paradigm that has dominated the fields of economics and politics for the past half-century—a paradigm we know alternately as neoliberalism and trickle-down economics.
This week, Eric and Nick have published a companion article to the Atlantic piece in the Democracy Journal that offers a deeper dive into the science and research behind Market Humanism. The piece makes three main points:
“First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one.”
“Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it,” and:
“Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science.”
That first point is an observation that hasn’t gotten enough attention over the past decade, as every pundit has struggled to explain the rise of nationalist politics. But really, it’s a pretty simple equation: After nearly 50 years of trickle-down politics that have slashed wages, forced economic uncertainty onto the majority of working Americans, and enriched a tiny handful of the wealthiest people and corporations, the American dream feels out of reach to a majority of the voting public.
When voters see criminal behavior rewarded with billions in profits even as working people can no longer afford basic necessities, they conclude that the entire system is corrupt. They’re more likely to vote for outsiders who acknowledge that corruption—even if those outsiders themselves seem to be profiting from the broken system.
“Democracies do not fail because citizens stop valuing freedom. They fail because citizens lose faith that democratic institutions can deliver the material conditions that make freedom meaningful: security, opportunity, the reasonable expectation of a better life for their children,” Nick and Eric write. “When that faith collapses, authoritarian alternatives become attractive not because they promise liberty but because they promise order, belonging, and an explanation for why things went wrong and who is to blame.”
At the same time, they argue, “The progressive response to this paradigm over the past 50 years has been, in retrospect, a strategic catastrophe.”
“Rather than contest the neoliberal theory of growth—rather than argue that trickle-down economics was wrong about the mechanism, wrong about the causation, and wrong about where prosperity actually comes from—Democrats largely accepted its premises and argued only about its conclusions,” Eric and Nick explain.
Simply propping up a system that rewards rule-breaking corporations and enriches the already-wealthy isn’t a compelling argument. And calling for a return to normalcy isn’t appealing when the majority of voting adults can’t recall a time in their lives when it felt like the economic system worked in their favor.
That’s where Market Humanism comes in. By not buying into the failed trickle-down arguments of the past and instead offering a clear case of how the economy actually grows—through the paychecks of working people—progressives aren’t just putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. They’re meeting the size and scale of the problem with a solution that actually improves outcomes for working Americans.
The Democracy piece walks the reader through the four major revolutions in thought that break from the trickle-down paradigm and establish a new economic understanding. Why should people care?
“Washing one’s hands was not a new idea, but when Pasteur’s germ theory of disease came along it changed from something doctors rarely did to something they had to do. And that one change had immense consequences for human wellbeing,” Nick and Eric write. “Likewise, most of the policies in Roosevelt’s New Deal were not new ideas, but they weren’t politically possible until the crisis of the Depression and Keynes’s paradigm shift made them a necessity.”
Market Humanism, they write, “is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it.” Instead, it “belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.”
If you live long enough, you are virtually guaranteed to fall for a scam at some point in your lifetime. Anyone who’s lived through a scam can tell you that accepting that you’ve been tricked is never easy. People often respond with anger and disbelief, making irrational decisions that make the situation even worse. That’s where we are right now, as a country.
But by accepting that we’ve been lied to for generations, and by understanding that working people aren’t takers who rely on the wealthy few to bestow wealth upon them but rather the one true source of America’s astonishing prosperity, we can begin to make some truly remarkable things happen.
Imagine if that $80 trillion that’s been sucked out of working peoples’ paychecks and up to the wealthy elite was returned to the wages and wallets of Americans around the country. We could build a second great American century, the way we did when the American middle class was at its strongest—one that ensures every child born in America truly has the chance to do better than their parents, and that nobody is one ambulance ride away from destitution. These are the kind of results that shift from fantasy to reality when you change how you think about the economy, and that’s what Market Humanism is all about.
The Latest Economic News and Updates
Worker Wages Flatline as CEO Pay and Corporate Profits Skyrocket
Every year, the Associated Press publishes the results of its annual CEO compensation survey, and the latest edition shows that the gap between CEOs and the workers who create value for them is bigger than it’s ever been.
“The typical CEO compensation package rose nearly 6% in 2025 to $17.7 million, as company boards rewarded their top executives for bigger profits and higher stock prices, and gave them incentives to stick around and make even more money for shareholders,” the AP notes. “The median employee at companies in the S&P 500 earned $89,744, reflecting a 4.7% increase year over year.”
“At half the companies in AP’s survey it would take the worker at the middle of the company’s pay scale 200 years to make what the CEO did in one,” the AP writes. That’s an increase from last year’s study, which found that the median worker would “only” have to work 192 years to earn one year’s worth of the CEO’s compensation.
“While the biggest gaps occur at companies where the CEO received compensation loaded with one-time awards of stock, the pay ratio also tends to be highest at companies in industries where wages are typically low,” the AP reports. “For instance, at Coca-Cola, its CEO earned nearly 1,739 times the median pay of $17,947 for its workers. The CEO at the retailer TJX Cos. makes about 1,774 times what a worker making the company’s median pay does.”
To be clear, that’s not a coincidence. These companies are literally choosing to pay as little as possible to their workers and shift the money that should have gone to wages over to corporate profits and executive pay. And it’s not just the employees who are paying the price for this outsized corporate greed—a 2021 study in Massachusetts found that four percent of TJX employees made so little in wages that they were on state food assistance programs, meaning that taxpayers in Massachusetts were subsidizing the corporation’s low wages.
So CEO pay has become completely unmoored from worker pay. This violates one of the central tenets of trickle-down economics, which told workers in Econ 101 textbooks for decades that they were paid exactly what the market determined they were worth. It seems hard to imagine how Coca-Cola’s CEO could possibly work 1739 times as hard as one of the workers in his bottling plants.
And now, another report shows that worker pay is increasingly detached from corporate profits, too. The latest Gross Domestic Product report finds that “Worker compensation—wages and benefits—grew 0.8% in the first quarter from the fourth, while domestic corporate profits jumped 2.7%,” reports Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal.
“As a result, labor’s share of gross domestic income (conceptually similar to GDP) sank to 51%, the lowest since records began in 1947,” Ip writes.
Meanwhile, “Profits’ share climbed to 12.1%, the highest since 1950.”
Ip reports that this growing chasm between corporate profits and worker pay is “the latest milestone in a trend that became pronounced in the 2000s, then picked up speed after the pandemic. Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages are up 3% since the end of 2019 while profits are up 50%.”
This raises an essential question that our elected leaders should be asking: If workers aren’t being compensated for the value they’re bringing to the corporations where they work, how are their wages being determined? Ip offers several explanations for why this is happening, including a decrease in union power, increased corporate concentration killing competition in the labor market, and the frenzy around AI investments that keeps pushing the stock market higher.
The answer is probably that all of these factors play a role in the divide between corporate profits and worker paychecks. But it’s also true that none of this would be happening without 40 years of trickle-down economics that have purposefully attacked worker power and rewritten tax codes and regulations to redistribute money to the top of the wealth scale.
Meet the Good Life Agenda
As my coworker Paul Constant noted here in The Pitch back in February, with the midterm elections happening this fall, we need to be talking about big ideas right now. Politicians, policy wonks, and civilians alike should be tossing out ideas for how government can improve the lives of working Americans.
The most important thing is that these ideas should be big. No occasional voter ever raced to the polls to support an idea that incrementally improved their living conditions. The American people have repeatedly proven that they want leaders to pass big ideas that invest in the lives of working Americans, not the super-rich.
That’s why I was pleased this week to read that the Roosevelt Institute published “The Good Life Agenda,” a sweeping policy platform proposal that would remake the American economy with workers at the center.
“This report lays out an agenda for reversing America’s slide into extreme inequality and oligarchy,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes in the foreword. “These policy ideas range from measures to improve affordability, to policies to increase economic security and improve life for families with children, to policies to restore power to ordinary Americans and limit the influence of corporations and oligarchs.”
The platform focuses on three major goals: Reducing costs, raising wages, and ensuring that Americans have more control over their time. Many of the problems it seeks to solve stretch all the way back to the dawn of the trickle-down era during the Reagan Administration:
That’s a huge mountain to climb, and the Roosevelt Institute identifies several tools that can help finish the job, including public options, taxes, industrial and anti-monopoly policies, among others.
These tools represent nothing so much as the most ambitious suite of policies since the Roosevelt Institute’s namesake in the New Deal era. There’s too much to list here, but the policies include reducing housing and medical prices, creating new paths to retirement savings, shorter workweeks, increased worker power, and much, much more.
I urge you to go check out the report and start discussing it with your social circle. Critics will undoubtedly call this agenda too ambitious, but that’s just concern-trolling. In order to repair the egregious damage done to the American economy over the last 40+ years, it’s going to take a lot of work. I’d argue that the Good Life Agenda is the first major policy suite I’ve seen that actually addresses the size and scope of the problem.
And if the second Trump administration has taught us anything, it’s that the old days of presidents focusing their attention on addressing one big policy at a time are long dead and gone. Whoever is in office next will have to move fast on multiple tracks in order to take back power from the super-rich and return it to the hands of working Americans, where it belongs.
Perhaps most importantly, Roosevelt tested the Good Life Agenda with the American people in a large poll, and the people resoundingly approved of this big-swing approach.
“79% of Americans support the Good Life Agenda overall—including 78% of people disillusioned with government and 86% of working-class people,” Impact Research reports, adding that “No demographic group tested falls below majority support.” Universal health care showed nearly 60% support with voters, and almost two-thirds of respondents call expanding Social Security “extremely important.”
Why are these polling numbers so high? It’s probably in part because eight in ten respondents told the pollsters that they are worried about their financial circumstances, with just 18% of respondents saying they haven’t cut their expenses at all during the past two years. Now that income inequality is felt by a super-majority of voters, the rules of politics have changed. The people want big, bold swings from leaders on their behalf, and the Good Life Agenda is nothing if not a big swing.
Of course, no policy agenda is perfect. What are your thoughts on the Good Life Agenda? What do you think it missed, what do you wish it included? As Paul wrote, now is the time to dream big and fight for what you believe in. This moment offers a better opportunity to change the paradigm and remake political economy than any other point I’ve seen in my lifetime. What an exciting time to be alive!
This Week in Trickle-Down
“The Department of Labor received nearly 40,000 comments on a proposed rule that would help 401(k) plans invest in alternative assets, including private equity and private credit,” writes Dan Primack at Axios. The rule would let 401(k)s off the hook if risky investments into private equity and private credit firms didn’t pan out, meaning that investors wouldn’t be allowed to sue if a private credit firm tanked and took their retirement funds with it.
The American Prospect looks at some of the grants that the Trump administration is supporting, including billions of dollars toward building the border wall, forced deportations, and a new plan “to set up a pilot program for doing debt collection on student debtors.”
“Americans are burning through their financial cushion at an accelerating pace, spending faster than their income is growing, as the energy shock from the Iran war slams household budgets,” writes Courtenay Brown at Axios. “In 65 years of economic data, the personal saving rate — that is, what’s left of a paycheck after taxes and spending — has been lower only in two other periods: briefly in 2022 and in the mid-2000s, before the financial crisis.”
This Week in Middle-Out
Based on recent threats that the super-rich are going to leave New York City because of proposed taxes on second homes and other additional taxes, “the Fiscal Policy Institute has published extensive research on the nature of outmigration in New York City. They found that the top 1 percent of earners are the least likely to move out of New York City, compared to the top 95–99 percent and bottom 95 percent income brackets,” reports AMNY. In other words, the super-rich get much more out of living in New York City than any of the proposed taxes might detract from their experiences, and their threats of leaving town are mostly just noise.
“Raising the federal minimum wage to two-thirds of the national median wage would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers, about a quarter of the workforce,” writes Ben Zipperer at the Economic Policy Institute. “Two-thirds of the median—equivalent to roughly $17.70 today, a projected $20 in 2030, and a projected $25 in 2038—matches the benchmarks used in other high-income countries and tracks the direction of recent minimum wage research. Indexing to median wage growth thereafter would keep the floor from losing ground to inflation or falling behind the broader economy.”
Real-Time Economic Analysis from Civic Ventures
On the Pitchfork Economics podcast, Goldy and Paul talk with Civic Ventures founder Nick Hanauer about the work he’s been doing with Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker to reimagine a new economic paradigm that invests in American workers, not the wealthy few at the top of the wealth scale.
And Nick went on the Young Turks to talk about why wages haven’t risen with productivity and why it would be better for the economy if workers made $2 trillion per year.
Closing Thoughts
Subscribers to this newsletter live all over the country—in nations all over the world, in fact—but I still feel confident in saying that wherever you’re reading these words right now, you have experienced some unusual weather patterns recently. Maybe it’s been an unnaturally hot spring. Perhaps you experienced some flooding or wildfires in your area. Maybe you were hit by a once-in-a-century snowstorm over the winter—and maybe that was the second or third once-in-a-century weather event you’ve had to deal with in your lifetime.
No matter where you live, climate change is impacting your life. And that means it’s impacting every single aspect of your life, affecting your purchasing decisions, your leisure habits, and your plans for the future. As we head into summer, these concerns are at the top of mind.
Climate change is also changing the way Americans work. It’s impacting the crops of farmers and the yields of ranchers. It’s making the commutes of Americans hotter and more unpredictable. And if you work outdoors, it has made your workplace much more dangerous.
This week, in her excellent newsletter, Heather Boushey shared an eye-opening chart showing how many Americans have suffered from injuries as the temperature gets hotter. “From 1999 to 2023, the number of heat-related deaths in the United States increased117%, with 2023 being the highest and 2022 being the second highest,” she writes.
Given that the last decade has been the hottest on record and this summer will bring an El Niño weather pattern that is expected to make rising temperatures and catastrophic weather events even worse, those numbers aren’t going down anytime soon.
“As climate change drives hotter, longer, and more frequent heat waves, millions of workers – especially in agriculture, construction, warehousing, and transportation – face increasing risks of injury, illness, and death,” reports the Groundwork Collaborative, adding “In 2023 alone, high temperatures contributed to an estimated 28,000 workplace injuries.”
Groundwork explains that the United States does not have “ a comprehensive federal standard to protect workers from heat exposure, leaving worker safety dependent on employer discretion and uneven state policies.”
The Biden Administration called on OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to establish national regulations protecting workers from heat exposure, but the Trump Administration has gutted the agencies that create and oversee these regulations and postponed the ruling, leaving workplace heat safety regulations squarely in the hands of state leaders. Boushey explains that “only 22 states have their own OSHA programs. Only seven states—ranging from Nevada to Minnesota—have heat-protection standards for workers.”
Groundwork notes that business groups and chambers of commerce have used the typical trickle-down arguments against national workplace heat safety regulations, framing them as “rigid,” “burdensome,” and “impracticable.” And those firms are combating state laws with even more fervor: “In Florida and Texas, industry groups successfully backed laws that prevent local governments from requiring basic workplace protections, like water and rest breaks,” Groundwork notes. “This multi-tiered corporate campaign to prevent enforceable standards from taking hold anywhere is hurting, and in some cases killing, workers.”
So what do good heat safety laws look like? “California’s heat standard, which mandates common-sense requirements including water, shade, rest, acclimatization, and adequate enforcement, was associated with a 33% reduction in heat-related deaths among outdoor workers,” Groundwork notes, adding that “Extending similar protections nationwide could prevent as many as 1,500 worker deaths each year.”
Given that the vast majority of voters are workers, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that these are incredibly popular policies. In 2024, Data for Progress polled Americans and found that OSHA’s proposed workplace heat safety regulations were popular with 90 percent of voters. That’s not a typo—nine out of ten Americans favor heat safety regulations. In fact, 86% of Republicans were in favor of the rule.
Those numbers are probably so high because, as I noted, this is an issue that affects just about everyone. Data for Progress reports that eight in ten voters are concerned about extreme heat in the workplace:
Workplace heat protections pass every single litmus test for a successful middle-out policy—they improve outcomes for workers, they restore faith in the idea that government can fight for working Americans against corporate greed and negligence, and they’re incredibly popular. If I were running for office in a state that was impacted by climate change—that is to say, all 50 states—I would work hard to let voters know that I am on their side in this fight.
Be kind. Stay strong.
Zach