If Michael Norton’s research is to be believed, Americans don’t have the faintest clue how severe economic inequality has become-and if they only knew, they’d be appalled.

Consider the Harvard Business School professor’s new study examining public opinion about executive compensation, co-authored with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok’s Sorapop Kiatpongsan. In the 1960s, the typical corporate chieftain in the U.S. earned 20 times as much as the average employee. Today, depending on whose estimate you choose, he makes anywhere from 272 to 354 times as much. According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO takes home more than $12 million, while the average worker makes about $34,000.

In their study, Norton and Kiatpongsan asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the U.S., how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers. Then they asked how much more pay they thought CEOs should make. The median American guessed that executives out-earned factory workers roughly 30-to-1-exponentially lower than the highest actual estimate of 354-to-1. They believed the ideal ratio would be about 7-to-1.

‘In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates,” the authors write.

Americans didn’t answer […]