With the internet and the massive amount more things that can be done by less people then there has been a trend towards stratification of salaries generally. E

With the internet and the massive amount more things that can be done by less people then there has been a trend towards stratification of salaries generally. Even companies like Amazon that still have high demand for physical labour in warehouses have an efficiency far higher per worker than would be possible before (think of the overheads there would've been to managing a company of the scale of amazon in the 70s). The gains from this mostly gone to central offices and people who can build and manage these systems (software people among them) so I think that trend goes someway to explaining increasing stratification. OTOH while companies as a whole have become more productive per person I'm very dubious that CEOs of companies have grown thousands of times more productive than everyone else without some pretty sketchy credit stealing of vast improvements in enterprise productivity. RE: Abolish billionaires that would be more to do with government policy. As much as corporate lobbyists talk about Tax discouraging enterprise etc there's very little evidence of reduced productivity in high tax economies like found in western europe. If we went back to 90% tax rates and wealth taxes etc you'd still have billionaires short of actual hard stops of 100% tax or whatever. It would just be harder to get there.