Ramstad: We’re wary of the super-rich. Also, we want to be the super-rich.

This is the annual weekend in which Minnesota’s CEOs dislike the Minnesota Star Tribune because we let readers see their compensation over the last year.

Current and former CEOs have recently asked me why the Star Tribune continues this ritual feature.

I’ve replied with the high-minded answer, which is that it’s a longtime exercise in accountability for investors, employees and broader society. These days, fewer news organizations have the resources to analyze the disclosures that publicly traded companies file with regulators each spring.

Nonprofits also disclose executive salaries in public tax filings with the IRS. Last year, a trio of business professors on the East Coast studied compensation of leaders of nonprofit organizations and found pay rose when local newspapers closed and other forms of external monitoring did not exist.

In the for-profit world, you’ll still see lists like this in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which reported last month the nation’s highest-paid executive was the leader of Axon Enterprise, maker of Taser stun guns. There are numerous investor-research companies that, for a fee, provide far more comprehensive data about executive pay.

The other reason we publish the CEO compensation chart is because our readership data shows thousands and thousands of you read it. Both answers are true: it is accountability journalism that also attracts strong reader interest. And those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

The Star Tribune’s content rarely overlaps with, say, Vanity Fair magazine or the old TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” One is our weekly Home Gazing feature looking at homes for sale in Minnesota that are often expensive.

In his new book “The Haves and the Have Yachts,” Evan Osnos of the New Yorker magazine says the way we’re drawn to people with money is instinctual.

The “celebrityfication of wealth,” as he calls it, is the reason so many of us watched the coverage of the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding in Venice last month.

“There is a piece of the pageant of wealth that does give people something to hope for,” Osnos said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang last month. “And then you have to recognize the illusion in it.”

The result is a competing set of feelings about wealth that Americans express in ways distinct from other countries, Osnos writes in the book.

Americans believe they have a shot at becoming super-rich while also remaining wary or suspicious the super-rich are holding them back.

A Harris Poll early last summer found 60% of Americans want to become a billionaire someday. It also found 71% agree with the statement, “Billionaires aren’t doing enough with their fortunes to better our society.”

“We really do believe in the power of being able to aspire to have that,” Osnos said in another interview, this one with Al Hunt, the retired longtime Washington bureau chief of the Journal.

“The thing is, we are also deeply bothered in our bones when it begins to seem as if somebody else’s advantages are so profound and out of step with history that they are actually standing in the way of anybody’s chance of getting that piece of the American Dream,” Osnos added.

That duality has its negative qualities, to be sure. But it’s better than living in a country where there is simply no possibility of climbing the economic ladder nor of challenging the powerful.

In my lucky career as a journalist, I’ve met and interviewed more than 100 CEOs and several billionaires, including Bezos. I can think of just one or two who made me wonder why they had the job.

Leading a company takes exceptional skills, including bearing the scrutiny of reporters, investors and the public who want to know about the money they make.

While I can’t begin to justify some of the huge payouts top executives receive, I can understand the reticence of seeing them publicly displayed for their neighbors.

Public figures may have safety concerns fueled by outside perspectives of them, as Minnesotans experienced tragically this past year with the killing of a CEO and a top legislator. There’s also the difficulty of reconciling with the Midwest’s relatively modest style of life.

In his book, Osnos writes that more and more of the super-rich are pulling away from their communities, and even countries, in yachts that have become the most expensive things that can be purchased by individuals.

By contrast, here in Minnesota, most business leaders are engaged in their communities. And our yacht clubs are grossly misnamed; they have no yachts.

For many years Minnesota led the Midwest in per capita income, yet it was never really a place of ostentatious consumption. Saks Fifth Avenue and Nieman Marcus survived less than 20 years in downtown Minneapolis, and the state has just one luxury mall — the Galleria in Edina.

Dan and Hope Wixon, who closed their Bloomington jewelry store this spring, to me embodied the way Minnesotans approach luxury and other trappings of wealth.

They offered dazzling jewelry — and brought their Labradors to the store. Customers could try on a Rolex while petting one of the Wixon dogs.

When I interviewed the Wixons, I made doubly sure they weren’t closing because of Minnesotans’ less-flashy way of life. They assured me business was great, and it was simply time to retire.

“There is money all over this state,” Hope Wixon said.

And most of the people with money have never been a CEO.