EXCERPTS: Speaking at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday, Mr Gurner told the audience he wanted to see Australia's unemployment rate "jump 40 to 50 per cent", in order to cause "pain in the economy" and "remind people they work for the employer, not the other way around".
He also claimed tradies had "pulled back on productivity" and had been "paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years".
In a statement on Thursday evening, Mr Gurner said he deeply regretted the remarks, which he said "were wrong".
"There are clearly important conversations to have in this environment of high inflation, pricing pressures on housing and rentals due to a lack of supply, and other cost-of-living issues," he said.
"I want to be clear: I do appreciate that when someone loses their job it has a profound impact on them and their families and I sincerely regret that my words did not convey empathy for those in that situation."
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The Australian Financial Review reported on Thursday that a senior manager at Mr Gurner's wellness and anti-ageing network Saint Haven had sought to assure staff that their founders' comments were not directed at them.
"I want to start by saying I've had the pleasure of working with Tim for almost two years now and can hand on heart say that his care and love for both the Gurner Group and Saint Haven team is immense," the manager reportedly said, adding that Mr Gurner's comments "were in no way directed at our teams".
Gurner Group says its development and management portfolio is worth more than $9.5 billion.
TITLE: Sky-high CEO pay is in focus as workers everywhere are demanding higher wages
EXCERPT: In 1965, CEOs typically earned 20 times the typical worker's pay in their industries, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
But executive compensation soared, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, when CEOs were lionized and a large chunk of their pay was linked to their company's stock performance. CEO pay skyrocketed along with the stock market, with the S&P 500 increasing by more than 1,000% since 1990. In the same period, workers' wages, adjusted for inflation, have barely budged.
In 2021, CEOs earned 399 times the typical worker, the EPI report found.
"Obviously, CEOs should be the highest-paid person in an enterprise," said EPI Chief Economist Josh Bivens, who co-wrote the report. "But the question is, how much higher than everyone else?"
However, the disclosure of CEO-worker pay ratios — a rule adopted in 2018 — doesn't appear to have helped bridge the gap thus far, said Cindy Schipani, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan.
And these ratios, Schipani added, are exceptionally high at U.S. companies.
"The American free market economy has taken this to such high levels," Schipani said.
The average hourly wage for workers manufacturing motor vehicles and parts, adjusted for inflation, has dropped by more than 20% in the past two decades, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To put that in perspective, in just one year — between 2021 and 2022 — Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares' total remuneration rose by 22%.
TITLE: Economic relationships in Pre-Columbian Mexico show that Aztec rulers were ruthless exploiters
EXCERPT: Alfani and Carballo estimated that before the conquest the richest 1% earned 41.8% of the total income; this figure grows to 50.8% if the richest 5% is considered. As the income share of the poorest 50% was just 23.3%, this makes for a very skewed income distribution, actually even worse than today. The imperial ruling class, the provincial ruling class and the non-ruling nobles amounted to less than 2% of the total population but concentrated 46.6% of the total income.
This is extremely important because it helps explain how a little Spanish army of just a few hundred men could quickly overrun the Aztec Empire. The highly centralized tax collection was so resented by vast regions of the Empire that their populations, whose living standards were only slightly above subsistence, actually took arms on the Spaniards' side.
"The rapacious institutions characterizing the Aztec Empire paved the ground for subsequent colonial exploitation," says Guido Alfani. "As we argue, the relatively high levels of income inequality that came to characterize Latin America could not be considered to have been the sole consequence of the initial conditions imposed by the Spaniards. Nor could they simply come from the predatory attitudes and institutions of the colonial elite. Instead, colonization further exacerbated the highly extractive conditions that had come into being before the conquest and ensured their continuation for centuries thereafter."