'He owns a $6 million home in an elite suburb of Dallas and 64 acres near Vail, Colo.' - and so on. 'He', here, is one of the beneficiaries of the widening gap in the US between 'those with the highest incomes and everyone else', and he is being used, in this column from the Washington Post, to illustrate a state of affairs in which (we are told) 'the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States' and 'the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent'. Further: 'executive compensation at the nation's largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled'; and 'a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap'.
Can inequalities of this extent be justified? Even if we were to accept that inequalities of some order are functionally necessary to attract people into the jobs that are most difficult to do, or to fill, or that require the most talent, or knowledge, or skill - an assumption I would normally want to question - we still need to consider what degree of inequality can be justified in this way. For it doesn't go without saying that any old degree of it can be justified.
Accordingly, here is a brief thought experiment in the spirit of John Rawls. We place a group of people, who will later be living in the same society, behind a Veil of Ignorance, such that each of them knows nothing of his or her own aptitudes nor of the position they will come to occupy as a result of these once the Veil is lifted and they all step into the places that fall due to them as a result of their own efforts, successes, failures, good and bad fortune, and so forth. Behind the Veil of Ignorance - in our hypothetical Original Position - they are to reason about the scale of inequalities that would be suitable to supporting their several working endeavours.
Not knowing who you will turn out to be, or where in the economic structure of society you will 'land', but knowing something (because this is allowed by the Rawlsian hypothesis) about general human motivation, you will agree to some level of inequality. You will agree to it because you will know - following the assumption accepted for the sake of argument in the previous paragraph but one - that, should you turn out to be one of those people able to fill the more 'difficult' positions, you will require some material incentive to be willing to do so.
But what level of inequality would be required by you, and what level would suffice to supply you with the necessary motivation? Since the alternative to being sufficiently motivated to make the effort necessary to gaining the benefits on offer is not making that effort and therefore occupying one of the lower rungs, so to say, of the economic hierarchy, it could be argued that any significant differential would do. Let us just say, arbitrarily, that earning twice or three times as much on the top rung as on the bottom must look like an attractive proposition behind the Veil of Ignorance, where (it is to be remembered) you still don't know whether you are destined for the top or for the bottom. But that you should be able to pull down in a single year what others can't earn over an entire lifetime seems unlikely to emerge from the deliberations in the Original Position as a reasonable agreement. Who could plausibly claim, 'Unless I earn in one year more than others can earn in a lifetime, I'd be unwilling to make the necessary effort for a top position; I'd prefer to struggle along on the bottom rung alongside everyone else'?
Maybe top executive pay and other very lavish remuneration can't be justified as what fair-minded and reasonable people would agree to in an Original Position. Maybe it's just what some feel able to get away with, the political constraints, or lack of them, being what they are.