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That’s what Megan McCardle wants to know. She says that exorbitant executive compensation for CEO‘s is a “comforting distraction”:

The real problem with income inequality is not a few hundred CEO's hogging everything; it's a few million affluent people ensuring that their offspring always come out on top.

Quite true. Though, I’d add that there are cultural and social ramifications to extreme wealth concentration which I think are quite insidious, if not as easily measured as the consequences of inequality or declining social mobility more broadly. That, and the fact that the skyrocketing executive compensation is evidence to many (myself included) that there’s a lot of self-dealing and class solidarity at the top that is part of what’s driving the broader inequality trends.

But it’s true that it’s easy for the media to focus on CEO‘s, largely because many of the people who feel personally offended by their exorbitant salaries are themselves quite well off. Rich, by definition, is always someone who has more money than you.