美国靠领薪水致富的有多少?

The idea of the 'leisure class' has been dying for decades. The wealth boom of the past 20 years has been fueled more by the working wealthy entrepreneurs and executives than by passive capitalists who earn a living off their investments and spend the rest of their days sailing or golfing.

Yet new research shows the change has been more rapid than we might expect. A study released Tuesday in Canada shows that the top 1% of earners now get more than two-thirds of their total income from salaries. That is up markedly since the 1950s and 1960s, when less than half (45%) of their total income came from paychecks.

'What's driving the trends is how the work of those at the top is valued. It's not capital gains, it's not how many assets you've got, it's really a question of earnings and how the work of the bosses, the celebrities, the artists, the athletes are rewarded now,' Armine Yalnizyan, senior economist Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, told the Vancouver Sun.

The U.S. has experienced a similar increase. According to income research from Emmanuel Saez, wages accounted for 56% of income for the top 1% of earners in 2008, up from 40% in 1960. Dividends, interest income and collected rent accounts for the rest. He also found that business ownership accounted for only a third of the occupations among the top 1%.

Says Mr. Saez: 'The evidence suggests that top incomes earners today are not 'rentiers' deriving their incomes from past wealth but rather are 'working rich,' highly paid employees or new entrepreneurs who have not yet accumulated fortunes comparable to those accumulated during the Gilded Age.'

The fact that soaring salaries at the top have helped the rich, and driven up inequality, isn't news. Attacks on Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay are now part of the daily media diet. Whether these salaries are actually justified or not is another debate.

But the marked increase of the salaried rich shows just how much the upper class has changed in recent decades. Thorstein Veblen, in his famous 'Theory of the Leisure Class,' published at the turn of the century, wrote that 'manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class.'

Today, even the true leisure class or what's left of them want to be seen as productive.

Why do you think salaries have replaced capital as the source of high incomes?