In Good Company

Estonians have grappled with the issue of how to reduce salaries of their parliament members during crisis time, and so far they've come up with no satisfactory answers (nor has parliament been especially helpful). But perhaps this first paragraph from Jeffrey Gettleman's review of Michela Wrong's book in The New York Review of Books will salve the wounds: "According to the United Nations, the average Kenyan makes $777 a year. Yet members of Kenya's parliament are among the highest paid in the world, with a compensation package of $145,565 (most of it tax-free). That is 187 times more than the country's average income and would be the equivalent of an American congressman making $8.5 million a year. And this is simply what is earned legally."