Inside Out | Here are seven ways for tackling Hong Kong’s morbid grinding sense of stagnation and inequality
It is true that there are many in Hong Kong who struggle to get by. But by comparison with most parts of the world, we live in a lucky place.
Now is the season of inequality. It is the time when companies like WPP meet shareholders and tell them why chief executive officer Martin Sorrell deserved £48 million (US$61.8 million) last year. It is when sports fans across bars in Europe fantasize about earning what Paris St Germain has just paid Barcelona for the Brazilian goal scorer Naymar da Silva Santos Jr – in dollar terms around US$268 million.
For those worried about inequality as a cancer at the heart of Western democracies, kindling the political madness that feeds Donald Trump, and that which ed to Brexit, there has in the past week nevertheless been a little bit of good news.
According to Deloitte and its annual remuneration report, and Britain’s High Pay Centre, the average British chief executive officer earned 20 per cent less last year.
Britain’s Teresa May is trying to jump on this bash-the-rich bandwagon by announcing plans to force companies to publish the ratio between their CEO’s pay package, and the salary of the company’s average worker.
One suspects this will do her little political good – and provide no noticeable comfort to the toiling envious masses at the wrong end of the inequality spectrum. On latest reckoning, a CEO whose company is among the FT100 still earns 229 times what the average worker earns in a year. Put another way round, a British worker earning the average income of £28,000 a year would need to work for 160 years to earn what the likes of Martin Sorrell earn in a year.