Over the past 25 years in the US inequality has gone up while violent crime has dropped.

> Economic inequality is the sole reliable predictor of a high level of violent crime in a society.

It might have dropped but it's still "a high level" - 10,000 gun deaths thus far in 2017 would indicate that.

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

Do you have a source? This seems wrong.

Presence of internal or external conflict seems to be the largest driver of violence.

Page 29: http://economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/GPI-...

Completely agree. However, controlling take-home pay seems a bit like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted.

What should really be done is to institute a financial transaction tax that both suppresses pure speculation and taxes actual wealth generation given the largest component of take-home pay for CEOs is stock.

I'd like to see a source, but I'm willing to bet even if you're able to find it, is a comparison of US vs various European countries. I'm willing to bet it's non exhaustive and excludes all sorts of countries in South America, Africa, Middle East, and Asia...

You're precisely wrong, actually. The source I would quote is unfortunately a dead-tree book, specifically the first chapter of the book 'Nine Crazy Ideas In Science'. The first chapter isn't even ABOUT economic inequality, but actually about the 'crazy idea' that tons of guns in a society could lead to less violent crime. The only actually sensible thing to do, of course, is to study EVERY society and not to cherry pick 'oh we'll only look at the developed countries and then claim to have found something about human society in general'. You look at all of them. And when looking at all of them, prevalence of gun ownership in a society had no correlation with violent crime. Not positive, not negative. So they threw in a thousand+ other demographic factors and couldn't find a single one that was a statistically significant predictor... except economic inequality. Poverty itself wasn't predictive, wealth itself wasn't predictive, only a presence of both poverty and wealth together was predictive, with the extremity of the gap predictive of the severity of the violent crime.

One thing I am uncertian of is how exactly they defined 'violent crime'. Most people only consider street crime when addressing the issue. But most death from crime is due to white collar crime. White collar crime (at least in the US) kills more people and causes more economic damage than street crime by a large margin (but is socially normalized among the upper class so rarely punished, and then only lightly).

Correlation, we all know, does not equal causation. On guns and inequality. Doesn't matter if there is a statistical correlation or not. It proves nothing.

For certain societies, banning guns might lower crime. For others, it might increase it. There's lots of complex factors in any society that can influence whether certain economic or legal policies are taken.

For example, a country with a strong militaristic culture and a law for drafting all of its citizens to the army, might have lower crime despite the prevalence of legal gun owners. All sorts of possible reasons for this.

Likewise, an island nation with strong border protection could ban guns altogether and probably see a drop in murders. It's all possible.

Societies are complex and woven with history, traditions, sub-cultures, economics, politics, and natural inclinations that can all influence the outcome of any policy for better or worse.

If reducing violent crime is the goal, there are of course many ways you can accomplish that. We should also weigh it against other goals like freedom from excessive tax rates.

But as far as solving violent crime through egalitarianism, focusing on executive pay (which is a tiny fraction of the population) seems misguided. Its too small a number of people to have a noticeable affect on violent crime.

This seems to mostly solve jealousy more than anything else.

Then why do big businesses pay out the big bucks to CEOs?

If it is basically CEOs and their board conning money out of the company, won't companies that don't engage in that kind of behavior have a competitive advantage and eventually overtake the poorly led companies?

It's basically conning, and yes it hurts the companies but for public companies it doesn't matter because that's the incentives of the board/CEO are out of whack. Shareholders aren't allowed to elect boards in public companies so they become interlocked with insiders.

And in reality a good CEO is worth an enormous amount of money so the actual amount that is earned and the excess that is grift is difficult to measure.