Leadership Quote by Barney Frank

Frank’s sentence is doing two jobs at once: sounding like sober policy analysis while quietly indicting an entire corporate ethic. The opening clause, “Increasing inequality,” is the respectable front door. It frames the issue as a measurable trend with “broader policy implications,” a technocratic phrase that signals he’s not making a moral complaint; he’s diagnosing a systemic risk. That posture matters in Washington, where moral outrage is easy to dismiss but “policy implications” demand a hearing.

Then he pivots to the sharper charge: “perverse incentives.” That term is a loaded instrument in the language of governance because it implies behavior that’s not merely unfair, but predictably destructive. The subtext is classic post-2008 skepticism: executive pay packages don’t just reward success, they can encourage short-termism, accounting games, and risk-taking that executives can cash out of while everyone else absorbs the downside.

The line “based on decisions they themselves take” is the tell. Frank is pointing at the circularity of power: executives shape the metrics, control the timing, and often influence the boards that approve the compensation. It’s not just that the pay is “grossly disproportionate”; it’s that the process resembles self-dealing with a legal veneer. He’s arguing that inequality isn’t an accidental byproduct of a dynamic economy, but an engineered outcome of incentive structures and corporate governance.

In context, this is the language of a legislator preparing the ground for intervention: tighter oversight, pay reforms, clawbacks, or rules that force accountability when private reward is built on public risk.