We're generally told that the entire economy is slipping down that slope to hell in that proverbial handbasket. and yet when we go and look at what people are saying, away from the politically oriented opinion pages, in those very same newspapers we find rather a different story. Things seem to be getting better, perhaps not as fast as we would like, but better they are indeed getting. From the Guardian: 

Roger Bootle here is nominally telling us about how difficult a problem high executive pay is. We don't think that's a problem but that's not our point here. Rather, to examine one of the numbers being used to bolster the argument. We don't think this number is telling us what people think it is: