I just realized that the reason CEOs in the 1960s made on average only 20x as much as workers and nowadays it's at 300x, has probably to do with the world leaving the gold standard.
You see, until 1971 the world's money supply was limited by a tangible asset: gold, whether directly or using the dollar as proxy (1944-1971).
Without this limitation central banks are able to print as much money as they need and set any type of interest rate to control the availability of credit. In a system with monetary expansion the huge winners are those who get first access to the newly created money, which could be through the government with subsidies but with the vaaaaast majority being companies through credit.
This gives companies a huge advantage in the economy and of course this includes CEOs who have a large amount of power in deciding how that money is used, or simply through shareholders who with cheap credit pay CEOs anything they want to ensure they get or keep the best.
Also notice when this gap between productivity and wages started to happen. This is probably also related to the end of the gold standard the availability of cheap credit which can be funneled massively in company production while wages don't need to be adjusted until the newly created money circulates through the economy enough to impact prices.
@Wander the 70s was when the idea was invented that "corporations should maximize shareholder value". before that, corporations were more customer-focused. financialization is more clearly a cause of rising inequality than going off the gold standard. (money has always been more complicated than gold reserves, because transactions are not instantaneous and credit exists. having a fixed amount of money is deflationary, it tends to encourage hoarding over spending, which cripples growth)
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