THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And unlike earlier years when the Dodd-Frank measure stirred things up some in the board room, nowadays it looks more and more like business as usual. This allows the dead wood to keep floating to the top.

The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law gave shareholders the ability to vote on the pay packages of top executives, and it turns out that they fall over themselves to approve.

More companies are achieving Fidel Castro-like election results this year than in the first two years since Dodd-Frank started requiring such votes. A full 72 percent of companies reporting votes so far have received 90 percent or more shareholder approval for their pay packages. That compares with 69 percent in both 2012 and 2011, according to Equilar, an executive compensation consultancy.

And shareholders are feeling relatively magnanimous about the rotten apples, too. Only 41 companies out of nearly 1,800 failed so far this year on say-on-pay votes, compared with 49 companies at this point last year, according to the companies tracked by the executive compensation consulting firm Semler Brossy.

Troublingly, investors pass larger companies more readily than they do smaller firms. But the chief executive of a large company deserves more scrutiny over pay, not less. That’s partly because the livelihoods of so many people depend on people running big firms, but also because those executives are largely caretakers of already established institutions. Typically, they have displayed neither vision nor entrepreneurialism but an ability to rise through a bureaucracy without offending anyone. When they arrive on the throne, they typically do a little bit better or a little bit worse than their predecessor, without distinguishing themselves in the least. Yet, they get paid as if they were the second coming of Henry Ford.

The final strike against say-on-pay is that it has had no impact on the level of compensation. Quite the opposite. Pay for chief executives was at its highest level ever last year, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, according to an Equilar analysis. After a brief dip at the height of the recession, pay for corporate chieftains rose 6 percent in 2011 and soared 24 percent in 2010. For those keeping score at home, that sharply outpaces inflation, which was a piddling 1.7 percent last year. Median worker pay didn’t keep up with rising prices in those years.

It was a well intentioned idea to get some equity between executive pay and performance and like previous good intentions, it is just another brick in the road.