Much of this can be accounted for by the simple fact that the companies have gotten bigger. Top CEOs are in charge of more people than ever before. Walmart has 1.4 million employees; if their CEO makes $35 million that's $25 per employee per year - a penny or so per hour per employee.

If a good CEO's decisions can make the average employee more productive (or less unproductive) by even few cents per hour of employment, he's worth that magnitude of salary when working for a company that big.

If we highlight the CEO-to-employee multiple, companies could game the metric by splitting into smaller companies that are slightly less efficient. For instance, there could be separate regional chains called "Walmart West" and "Walmart East", each with their own CEO who gets paid half as much for doing half as much work. They could even both hire the same guy and have him work both jobs at once, thereby reducing to a previously-solved problem! Or they could actually hire two distinct CEOS, which benefits the employees not at all - in fact, the employee situation might be made worse in various ways by the change - but at least the multiple would officially look smaller so: yay?