One of my first assignments as a junior reporter at the Financial Times in Chicago in 1987 was to cover the Black Monday stock market crash. That October’s steep decline remains the biggest singleday fall in US stocks. It was also an early lesson for me in the role of greed in our Western markets and capitalism.

The US investors in the late 1980s thought they had invented a form of insurance through the new derivatives markets that would insulate their portfolios from dramatic losses in the event of a stock market downturn. This gave them a false sense of confidence that risk was well managed. It led many brokerages and investing institutions to take more risks with their money in pursuit of high gains.

However, when the stock market fall came, it turned out that this so-called portfolio insurance not only did not protect their investments from losses, but actually exacerbated the decline. I was to witness this exuberance and neglect of the dangers in the build-up to many more market downfalls – right up to the banking crisis of 2008.

Greed has become one of the driving forces for many in our executive class, trumping long-term considerations about the future of their companies and the workforce, even overcoming fears about the fragility of capitalism itself. When there is the opportunity of enriching yourself to the extent that you and your family need never work again, who would not avail themselves of the option?

Policymakers, top public servants and academia have been sucked into the self-enrichment of the corporate elite and have sought to gain a piece of the action. Governments have been captured by business and failed to act on excessive pay at the top, politicians and public servants have sought careers in the private sector, and academics have bolstered the edifice while also feasting on the crumbs from the corporate table.

In this book, I am taking a look at how we built a super-elite class of multi-millionaire captains of industry and the implications this has for the economy, for the rest of the workforce and for us as a society. Soaring top pay and stagnating wages for the workforce have driven a sharp rise in inequality and fed perceptions of unfairness, undermining morale and faith in the system itself.

This analysis is a subjective description of what I have seen during my career and draws on lots of research done by the High Pay Commission which I chaired in 2010–11 and the High Pay Centre think tank which I set up in 2012.

Dysfunctional pay structures and the gulf between income for those at the top and the rest are not the inevitable products of late-stage capitalism. They are the outcome of choices made by governments and company boards about markets, incentives, tax rates and regulation. In many ways, they are also a fundamental misreading of human motivation.