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Now welcome to the award-winning BestOfTheLeft podcast with Cook's Today from the Young Turks,

Democracy Now, Counter-Spin, Lawyers & Company, BBC News Night, Activism from Votes to End,

Hunger, and Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolfe.

So Americans seem to have a misconception about where we are in terms of inequality in incomes.

Now everybody believes in the American dream, kind of, mostly, as you're about to see, right?

But they don't realize the reality was happening.

Now, it wasn't always this unequal.

If you go back to the 1960s, actually the numbers are pretty good.

In the 1960s, for example, according to Jordan Weissman, who's looking at some of the studies involved here,

the typical corporate chief in the US earned 20 times as much as the average employee.

Okay. Now that seems like a big number, but I'm comfortable with that.

It turns out a lot of Americans are comfortable with that.

In fact, when they were asked, the median American gets the executives out-earned factory workers

roughly 30 to 1.

So actually, in the 1960s, we were doing better than the average Americans expectations

in terms of equality between the CEOs, the executives, and the rest of the workers.

All right. So far, so good.

Now, when you ask Americans, though, what should it be?

They believe that the ideal ratio would be about 7 to 1.

They thought it was 30 to 1.

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