The New York Times has excellent coverage today about what they call Executives Pay.
In one of the graphics, they compare the “years of school required to understand the text” of different print products.
Clarity Communications, an investor relation firm, examined the executive compensation reports of 40 companies using three established measures of readability.
Among them, the Gunning Fog index considers sentence length and the complexity of words.
The index suggests that compensation reports are very difficult to read when compared with other common texts.
For instance, you would need…
6 years of school to understand TV Guide or The Bible.
8 years for Reader’s Digest.
10 years for Time or Newsweek.
11 years for The New York Times or the U.S. Constitution.
14 years for The Times or The Guardian.
The New York Times also includes an amazing interactive infographic that shows the relation between CEO’s pay and performance of the companies.