Last year, Jeff Fairburn became something of a poster child for the perceived excesses of contemporary capitalism. Fairburn had worked for nearly thirty years at the publicly listed UK housebuilder Persimmon, ultimately making his way to the very top of the management heap. But the beginning of the end of his tenure came in late 2017 when the company announced that its chief executive was entitled to a performance-related, share-based bonus of £110 million, triggering intense public criticism.

Less than a year later, Fairburn was gone. He didn’t really help himself. Despite agreeing to a reduction in the bonus to a more modest £75 million and pledging to give some of the money to charity, Fairburn insisted that the original award had been deserved, the result of his working “very hard.” No one was persuaded, and the inevitable occurred in November when Persimmon, buffeted by relentless negative publicity, asked him to leave. To general dismay, Fairburn walked off with all £75 million. Much less noted was the fact that the man who replaced him, the company’s managing director, had himself received a bonus in excess of £40 million from the same scheme. There was also relatively little attention paid to the role of Persimmon’s shareholders in all of this.

Inequality has been a buzzword for social and economic commentators of all stripes in the past half-decade, and jaw-dropping levels of executive pay have come to be seen as a particularly egregious manifestation of income and wealth gaps. At Persimmon, for instance, Fairburn’s spoils were thrown into sharper relief by the fact that the company didn’t even pay a living wage to employees at the other end of the income spectrum.