Are Chief Executives Overpaid?

Wages for the majority have been stagnant for decades, but a lucky few have enjoyed a pay bonanza. Top company bosses take home in several days as much as most people earn in a whole year.

In this hard-hitting book, Deborah Hargreaves explains why pay for the top 0.1% has sky-rocketed in the past 20 years. She gives a devastating account of how it has created a vicious circle that destabilizes our economy and undermines social cohesion, demolishing the twisted logic of the chief executives who say: ‘I’m worth it’, when that means raking in £70m a year.

A rigorous exposé of the dysfunctional nature of our ‘winner-takes-all’ economy, this book debunks the myths behind top pay and examines a range of pragmatic solutions. Foreword vi

1 Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? 1

2 Just Deserts? 28

3 Why Top Pay Matters 55

4 Corporate Governance Fights a Losing Battle 76

5 What Can Be Done? 95

Conclusion 124

Notes 128

"Nothing is so politically alienating as the way society has lost control over obscene top pay. No-one is as trenchant – and readable – as Deborah Hargreaves in her expert analysis."
—Polly Toynbee, The Guardian

"In her extremely valuable book, Deborah Hargreaves demonstrates that the explosion in executive pay overwhelmingly reflects rent extraction. That is economically damaging, because performance-related pay encourages poor decision-making, and socially destructive, because it undermines the legitimacy of capitalism."
—Martin Wolf, The Financial Times

Deborah Hargreaves is former business editor of the Guardian and a founder and director of the High Pay Centre, an independent think-tank that monitors executive pay.