It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s. But now the bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up, as David Brooks explains in this brilliant description of upscale culture in America. It is hard to tell an espresso-sipping professor from a cappuccino-gulping banker.

Alex Edmans and Xavier Gabaix suggest that increasing executive pay mainly reflects the real value of executives. But they also advocate for reforms that would induce executives to attend more to long-term profits and value.

Jesse Fried's PowerPoint presentation to accompany his talk at the Executive Compensation event sponsored by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality and hosted at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC on May 4, 2010. See also the PowerPoint audio file of this talk.