You don’t have to be on Wall Street to take home tens of millions as a CEO, reports the New York Times in a report on executive pay. The paper contrasts former ConAgra CEO Bruce Rohde who took home $45 million and left with a $20 million retirement package despite indifferent results during his tenure, with a factory worker who after nearly 30 years is still making only $28,000.

And the gap is going to get wider reports the Times as low-cost labor in China and India and technological change pushes American wages lower. Last year, wages rose 2.9 percent, not enough to keep pace with inflation at 3.3 percent.

The average pay for a chief executive increased 27 percent last year, to $11.3 million, according to a survey of 200 large companies by Pearl Meyer & Partners, the compensation practice of Clark Consulting. The explosion in stock option packages has pushed CEO pay through the roof as has increasingly lavish recommendations of “compensation consultants” who stand to win other lucrative contracts. And boards don’t stick to their guns on performance-based compensation.

And in the last 60 years the multiple of executive pay and worker pay has jumped from 68 times to 170 times. The current concern about all this is reminiscent of the argument in the 1980s when gurus everywhere looked at Japanese companies where CEO pay was a much smaller multiple than US companies.

The exact multiple is not the question. It seemed smart when some Japanese companies were soaring in the 1980s but lower pay didn’t make those CEOs smarter or less corrupt. And Japan is only now coming out from under a mountain of bad investment decisions during the last two decades.

The real questions are: Is the CEO worth it? And that requires stronger SEC rules and more active participation from major shareholders like pension funds, which have often acquiesced in huge pay for mediocre executives.

And the other question is: What will companies do if the vast middle class really is shrinking? Think of the 1920s when prosperity ruled but masters of the universe took a huge share of the wealth and ultimately drove the economy to Depression because most people’s spending power could not sustain the economy.

Times columnist Gretchen Morgenstern follows up with a report on how compensation consultants do their work. And it makes for some scary reading.

It illustrates the general point that consultants are not independent. In the case of Verizon, for example, the consultants approved a generous package for the CEO despite faltering results. But the consultants also manage Verizon’s employee benefits and pensions. That’s a big contract ($500,000,000 since 1997)that no company would want to lose because a customer’s CEO was upset about his compensation report.

Uber-investor Warren Buffett derided this cosy relationship in his annual report: “Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse C.E.O. — aided by his handpicked V.P. of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet & Bingo — all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.”

Morgenstern quotes Treasury Secretary John Snow with the usual defense: The market sets the CEO pay rates. But that’s not true. It’s not the marginal productivity of CEOs that’s reflected in pay packages but the aspirations of boards to that marginal productivity. Paying CEOs is too often the triumph of hope over experience.