Those eye-popping compensation packages lavished upon top executives and the other Masters of the Universe who bestride the corporate world are enough to make the average person think, “I really should have paid more attention during Arbitrage class in high school.” As staff writer John Lippman reported on Wednesday, the Upper Valley’s own White Mountains Insurance Group cut a few of those big checks last year.

But as big as those compensation numbers seem — and from a Northern New England perspective they seem huge — the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, enacted in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2007, now requires that they be accompanied by an even more interesting number that helps put executive pay in perspective.

First, the big numbers: At least four current and four former executives at White Mountains Insurance, the multibillion-dollar Hanover-based insurance holding company, received multimillion-dollar compensation deals in 2017, according to the company’s most recent proxy statement, including former chief executive Ray Barrette, who received a cash retirement payout of $21.3 million. (Theatergoers will recognize Barrette’s name because he and his wife, Cynthia, were major donors to the $9 million campaign to build a new home for the Northern Stage theater company in White River Junction. The Barrette Center for the Arts opened in 2015.)

Other former White Mountains executives who received big payouts last year include David Foy, the former chief financial officer, whose compensation totaled $8.9 million; T. Michael Miller, former chief executive of OneBeacon Insurance Group, $6.3 million; and David Linker, former president of WM Advisers, $4.2 million.

Current executives did well, too. G. Manning Rountree, who took over as chief executive after Barrette retired, earned $6.6 million in 2017, with $5.5 million of it in stock awards. Executive vice president and CFO Reid Campbell received $6.4 million; executive vice president and chief counsel Robert Seelig received $4.8 million; and J. Brian Palmer, managing director and chief accounting officer, received $2 million.

Harken back with us now to the early 1980s, when Vermont ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s established a rule that no employee, including the CEO, could make more than five times what the company’s lowest-paid worker made.

The Dodd-Frank law takes a small scoop from the Ben & Jerry’s rule. It doesn’t cap CEO pay, of course. But as of this year it does require that publicly traded companies calculate the compensation of their median-paid employee, compare that number with the CEO’s pay, and express it as a ratio. (“Median” means half the company’s employees are paid more and half are paid less. The CEO’s pay is not included in that calculation.)

In the case of White Mountains Insurance Group, that ratio is 75-to-1, based on the median employee compensation of $88,307 and Rountree’s $6.6 million package.

While that’s nearly double the 41-1 ratio posted by big companies in 1983, according to a long-running AFL-CIO study, it’s relatively small — even comically tiny — when set against what some other big companies are reporting.

For example, Connecticut-based Eversource Energy, which had hoped to build the Northern Pass transmission line through New Hampshire, calculated a ratio of 127-to-1, based on CEO James J. Judge’s $15.9 million compensation package and the median Eversource employee pay of about $125,000. New Jersey-based Honeywell International Inc., which makes everything from thermostats to aerospace and defense systems, had a ratio of 333-to-1 in 2017. North Carolina-based underwear giant Hanesbrands Inc.’s ratio was — hold onto your socks — 1,830-to-1. While CEO Gerald Evans Jr. knocked down $9.19 million last year, the huge disparity is due to the very low median employee pay of $5,237, reflecting the fact that more than 80 percent of the apparel company’s 67,000 employees are located in Central America, the Caribbean and Asia.

But the compensation disparity king so far — the Big Mac, if you will — is McDonald’s Corp. Chief Executive Officer Stephen Easterbrook, whose $21.8 million in compensation last year was 3,101 times that of the median employee. McDonald’s, like Hanesbrands, is a huge company and has about 235,000 employees all over the globe. Its median-paid worker was determined to be a part-timer in Poland who earned $7,017.

In addition to reporting the compensation ratio, Dodd-Frank also requires companies to allow its shareholders to weigh in regularly on executive compensation. And in fact, as Lippman reported, a “reasonable minority” of White Mountains shareholders voiced disapproval of the company’s compensation proposals last year. We think this “say on pay” mandate is an important feature that may help keep company boards from going off the rails when determining executive compensation.

We’d also like to suggest that, while some executive pay packages seem outrageous, it may not necessarily be that those in the C-suites are making too much. Rather, the problem may be that the average worker is still making too little.