CEOs pay and the New Model Army

What should be the ratio of chief executives' to workers' pay? Right now, the ratio in the US is near record highs. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the average chief executive gets paid 262 times as much as the average worker, the second highest ratio ever. He gets 821 times as much as a minimum wage-earner - a record. These numbers seem to vindicate Brad DeLong's worries that inequality is now rising again.
Most of us have a gut instinct that these ratios are too high. But by what benchmark?
Here's one possibility - the New Model Army. Many people think of this as a rare example of a successful organization formed on left-wing principles. In this book, Diane Purkiss tells us that its commander, Thomas Fairfax, was paid £10 a day whilst infantry got 8d.
That's a ratio of 300 to 1.
Deflated by prices, Fairfax's wage is equivalent to over £1200 a day in today's money. Deflated by wages, it's £17,200 - over £6m a year.
The infantry's wage was roughly a minimum wage, so this is comparable to the CEO-minimum wage ratio in the early 1990s.
This paper (pdf) estimates that skilled workers got around 17d a day in the 1640s. So Fairfax got 141 times as much as them. That's bigger that the CEO-average wage gap before 1997 but much less than now.
What's the point of this? I dunno. Here's some possibilities:
1. The New Model Army, despite its reputation - it inspired this left-wing band - was not a particularly egalitarian organization.
2. The vaguely Whiggian notion of progress towards greater equality seems mistaken.
3. It's tricky to justify CEOs' pay by performance. Does the average CEO really deliver better results, against fiercer competition and with more at stake, than Fairfax delivered?

Comments

[dearieme]

This is all beside the point. CEOs are paid heaps because they are effectively judges in their own cause. The proposition that the shareholders should leave the running of the company to the directors obviously makes no sense when it comes to determining the directors' pay. Why the ratio has increased so much of late is a different matter. I suggest that it is because baby-boomers now fill all such jobs and they are a notoriously immoral mob.