Three years ago I decided to teach myself economics, so I grabbed a copy of Samuelson's textbook which, I am told, is the introduction to economics that pretty much everyone on the planet first sees.

The textbook's discussion of the way the market mechanism helps determine how resources should be allocated is to talk about "dollar votes".

Insidiously, the textbook uses the reader's attachment to democracy and "votes" to present market decisions as "dollar votes", and so legitimising the idea that, the more money you havem the more decision-making power you legitimately have.

It didn't take much longer before I decided the textbook was crap and abandoned it, but what did you expect to find in the FT? 3100 "top earners" are probably close to a plurality of "dollar votes".

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."