Maybe folk could be consistent?

The High Pay Commission - hint, it’s not a commission, it’s a pressure group - tells us that the inequality of reward for going to work is unconscionable.

The bosses of Britain’s biggest companies will have made more money in 2024 by Thursday lunchtime than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to analysis of vast pay gaps amid strike action and the cost of living crisis.

The High Pay Centre, a thinktank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers, said that by 1pm on the third working day of the year, a FTSE 100 chief executive will have been paid more on an hourly basis than a UK worker’s annual salary of £34,963, based on median average remuneration figures for both groups.

This is where we get those pay ratios of 300:1 and so on from. This is bad, apparently.

And, well, hmm. Several of us here have written books. Some on the subject of economics. Thinking of one specific example, the fee was £1,000. OK. Writer and publisher make their agreement, publisher pays what he thinks it’s worth, writer accepts that valuation and does the work. We have a voluntary and free market arrangement.

Shareholders of a FTSE100 company decide what they’d like to pay their CEO, both sides agree, we have a voluntary and free market arrangement.

M. Piketty writes a book on economics which sells a couple of million copies. Given likely royalty rates that brings in perhaps $8 million (it was with a US press). We have an 8,000:1 pay ratio there between M. Piketty and another labourer in the economics mines. This is also a free market and voluntary agreement.

Which leads to a question for that High Pay Commission. Why is M. Piketty’s reward not at least 20 times more vile than that CEO pay ratio? We know why, obviously - free market and voluntary and none of anyone else’s business. But why do they not decry it, complain of it, demand that something be done about it?

It’s not too, too, much to ask that people be consistent, is it?