Time marks and quotes 0:20 “I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What’s changed is we can now look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does.” 0:52 “I want to start though, with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against Gross National Income. How rich countries are on average and you see the countries on the right like Norway and USA are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, and Portugal on the left and it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There’s no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This again is life expectancy. These are small areas of England and Whales, the poorest on the right, the richest on the left, not a difference between the poor and the rest of us, even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. 1:40 “So income means something very important within our societies and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that within our societies we’re looking at relative income or social position, social status, where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. And as soon as you’ve got that idea you should immediately wonder ‘What happened if we widened the differences, or compressed them, make the income differences bigger or smaller? 3:10 *(Graph) Index of Social Problems and Inequality: -Life expectancy -Math & Literacy -Infant mortatlity -Homicides -Imprisonment -Teenage births -Trust -Mental Illness, including drug & alcohol addiction -Social Mobility 3:50 “The more unequal countries doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It’s an extraordinary close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, Gross National Income, there’s nothing there.” 4:45 *(Graph) “Child well-being is better in more equal countries” 5:05 “What all the data I’ve shown you so far says the same thing. The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That’s very important in poorer countries but not in the rich, developed world.” 5:35 *(Graph) “People in more unequal countries trust each other less” “Here for instance this is trust. It’s simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted, comes from the World Values Survey. You see at the more unequal end it’s about 15% of the population who feel they can trust others. But in the more equal societies it rises to 60% or 65%.” 6:05 “I may say we did all this work twice. We did it first on these rich, developed countries. And then as a separate test bed we repeated it all on the 50 American states. Asking just the same question, do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures.” 6:30 “Basically we found that almost anything that’s related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the states and that’s a separate test bed. We’re not just talking about a fluke.” 6:45 *(Graph) “Mental illness is more common in more unequal societies” “This is mental illness. W.H.O. put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. This (new graph) is the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. And it goes from about 8% up to 3x that. Whole societies with 3x the mental illness of others. And again, closely related to inequality.” 7:18 *(Graph) Homicide rates are higher in more unequal US states and Canadian provinces “This is violence. These red dots are American states and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. But look at the scale of the differences. It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150.” 7:35 *(Graph) “This is the proportion of the population in prison. There’s about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side, but it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. In some places that’s part of it. But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. And the more unequal societies are also more likely also to retain the death penalty.” 8:05 *( Graph) More children drop out of High School in more unequal US states “Here we have children dropping out of high school. Again, quite big differences, extraordinarily damaging. If you’re talking about using the talents of the population.” 8:15 *(Graph) Social mobility is lower in more unequal countries “This is social mobility. It’s actually a measure of mobility based on income. Basically it’s asking do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? And at the more unequal end father’s income is much more important, in the UK, USA. In the Scandinavian countries father’s income is much less important. There’s more social mobility. And as we like to say and I know there’s a lot of Americans in the audience here, if Americans want to live the American dream they should go to Denmark.” 9:05 “They’re all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient but there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries. Not just a little bit worse but anything from twice as common to ten times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that.” 9:38 “In graph after graph we find that countries that do worse whatever the outcome seem to be the more unequal ones. And the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. So what we’re looking at is general social dysfunction related to inequality. It’s not just one or two things that go wrong. It’s most things. 11:00 “I’m not talking about perfect equality. I’m talking about what exists in rich, developed market democracies.” 11:10 “And now we’re in a really surprising part of this picture. Is that it’s not just the poor who are affected by inequality. There seems to be some truth in John Dunn’s ‘No man is an island’. 11:25 *(Graph) The benefits of greater equality are not confined to the poor but extend to all social classes “In a number of studies it’s possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy.” 11:32 *(Graph) Infant mortality by class: Sweden compared with England & Wales 12:20 “The biggest difference is at the bottom of society. But even at the top there seems to be a small benefit to a more equal society. We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. And that seems to be the general picture. That greater equality makes most difference at the bottom but has some benefits even at the top.” 12:45 What’s going on? Psycho-Social affects 13:30 *(Graph) What kind of stressful tasks raise stress hormones most? 14:40 Some Questions: -Is this just picking and choosing data? -What about other countries? -Why not control for other factors? -What about causality? 15:30 “What about causality? Correlation in itself doesn’t prove causality. We spend a good bit of time and indeed people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. The big change in our understanding of drivers of health in the rich, developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is, affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on.” 16:10 *(Graph) What can be done? Increase differences before tax: -Increase company democracy-employee ownership etc -Promote more directors from within companies Taxes & benefits: -Stop tax avoidance -End tax havens -Make taxation progress again 16:25 “I think the take home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. Suddenly we have a handle on the psycho-social well-being whole societies and that’s exciting.”
The French Revolution took place against the aristocrats taking advantage over the poor. At least the French poor of that time had guts to revolt. These days, the mankind are so heavily programmed to believe one has to have money and education to protest against the Gov't and establishment. The mankind lost self-determination. That is the root cause of all the human problems. ''Gutless Society''.
My mom is a teacher who owns her own home but is single, and we struggled. I have worked full-time since the age of fifteen and have paid into SS since age thirteen. I have never got in trouble in my entire life. I was in the Navy as a field hospital corpsman and now am a veteran who is 20% disabled. I get less than $300 per month with 20%. I was an LPN before going back to school, and at age 38, I will graduate with my BSW. I will still not be able to afford to purchase a home, and since my husband died, I can't make a high enough salary to support myself with my two children. I didn't grow up with a father or male figure. Females have a difficult time getting ahead. Nothing is equal in the United States.
Every GCSE and A-Level Economics class has watched this video when you start the topic on Inequality and Poverty. No doubt the teacher will pause before every graph and the multi-choice test will come next. Classic.
@@LockedInVon If you study sociology or social epidemiology as Richard Wilkinson does and you aren’t using a marxist analytical framework you’re likely an idiot
I think what changed your way of looking at the world was either your lack of economic understanding so he can lie to you nonstop and you believe it or your doctor gave you a lobotomy when you werent looking. Because what he isnt giving you information about in this video is how economy works in reality, to start a business you need investors, but now you have redistributed too much money so there are no investors. So no new jobs are created, so wage growth stops dead in its track while inflation takes over and your income which doesent increase is worth 2% less every year, and in 20 years time you have to sell your house just to feed yourself, sadly you bought it for 500,000 and today you sell it for 50k leaving you with a bank loan of 450k.... so you cant afford to feed yourself so you starve to death when your 40-50. You helped everyone a lot here didnt you.
6:40 While the trend is correct, the measuring system is not fool proof (be it surveys or census). Because they are culture dependent. For instance, in Japan, majority of people or even doctors still don't recognise mental illness/depression as a legitimate medical problem. Hence you would obviously have low mental illness reports, because they don't even report in the first place! Even though majority of employees in Japan are overworked, and have depression, they don't even recognise it. That's the issue.
But by that logic, you would have to exclude every country. Because every country is different in their culture, which would influence the result differently. Thus making them all unable to be compared. In the end there is no perfect way to compare them. Thus it's better to use one measurement for all. Making them somewhat comparable.
A very informative video with great primary source statistics! It was fascinating to learn about the social and economic impacts that greater wealth inequality between the lower and upper class on society will have on developed countries; Wilkinson mentioned problems such as high crime rates, higher population with obesity, lack of government trust, and drug addiction that were associated with high-income inequality which are undesirable. It's a real shame that many developed countries such as the UK and the United States are unable to address this issue with solutions. Furthermore, it would have been nice if the speaker highlighted specific government policies or examples that would reduce inequality.
And this is more health costs at the end!! More people with obesity with the health problems that go together like diabetis, heart problems. And more mentally ill people means more laboral and health costs!! Laboral because they cannot work and health because they need medicación go to the doctor! More prisioners means more prison costs too
This guy has everything backwards. High crime rates, obesity, mental health issues and drug use cause inequality and not the other way around. Scandinavia has less inequality because population has no diversity. Change population there and have people from poor countries and it will have same inequalities. He is in the business of fooling people without critical thinking with data. How many people will clap or like my presentation if I say your life in the long term is about your choices and not about how rich or poor your neighbors are. Populist ideas are always liked by people and such ideas cause inequality and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
What is it about this data that makes people react how they do? What is at stake, what would be gained or lost by accepting that this may be true? It seems that some viewers feel threatened by the idea that there is something negative about current arrangements in rich developed countries. But are they saying that they believe that large inequalities should be defended for some reason?
Di Smith Some people are worried about this and it affecting equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. People are worried about how it will affect employability in the future.
Some countries don't like being evaluated in any negative way. This is especially bad for some people in the U.S. where jingoism is pretty prevalent. If they don't see their country as the best in the world they take it personally whereas they should not.
Here as a 30 years old, looking over the comments like a history lesson. Half of my lifetime gone since the release of this piece. So, nothing really changed after 12 years, hasn't it?
It doesn't feel as though merely liking, favoriting, and sharing this adequetly expresses how awesome this video is. I think it might be the best Ted Talk I've ever seen.
Really well presented case. I like that he goes to the data rather than rely on personal testimonies to argue his point, unlike in most other TED talks.
This is one of the most idiotic videos there are in the internet. The speaker is assuming that there is a fixed pie of wealth. That if someone gets rich, that must mean someone else has to get poorer. That is false.
He never did that kind of assumption. It is not about how rich someone is it is about how big is the gap between richest and the poorest. And even though he would have said something like that it would be completelly true. There is only so much money so if someone has it, someone else doesn't have it. You might wanna check out this: gawker.com/rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer-1631000921?fb_action_ids=10203633878780046&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582 (and the links) It shows how richer are getting richer as poorest are going to be even poorer. This is not a subject of opinion.
WMfin ""There is only so much money so if someone has it, someone else doesn't have it."" Man, you're so stupid. Study some basic economics. The money supply always grow in order to accommodate the growing supply of good and services. The Government printsIf the money supply isn't growing, then how com we have inflation? You see how stupid you are? If a businessman earns $50 billion, that means there is additional $50 billion in the economy in the form of additional cash and goods and services. And billionaires do NOT keep billions of cash under their mattresses. They INVEST their billions in new factories and companies that create new products and more jobs. And even if they just put money in the bank, the bank doesn't hoard the money. It loans out the money to other people. So money is circulated. Learn some basic economics, liberal socialist fool
Why do you have to call me with names? Still, even though money is in motion being circulated the system getting money is taking it away from someone else. If you use word "earns" it means it is away from someone. If a businessman loans it, well I think you are well aware how it is just numbers in bit-space and there is no money in the system to cover interest. And what it comes to seeing billionaires as a saviours. Well, take a look at the world and tell me how much good they are doing with 40% of earth's resources to poorest 40% of people. By the time newly created money has fallen to poorer class it has already lost it's value and new money crisis is at the door. AND since I am stupid liberal socialist, just today I read how rightwing-fools here in Finland didn't like the trade union movement because because of them people are getting too much money. Still I can't believe that those kind of people would do normal job even with that wage doubled.
This fits very well with what the statistics show. It does not matter about how rich you are, it is the fact that your position in the system is very important and that you do not spend much time truly socializing with people at a lower level of social position. Social stratification and the mistrust that follows can lead to stuff such as what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The issue of income disparity is often overlooked by many. Even if people do realize such disparity, there is no clear solution. As people act according to their own interests, higher taxation on the rich would only create conflicts between the upper class and the government. Thus, the government should implement a combination of policies to ameliorate the issue. Hopefully, situations have been improved in the last 8 years
You couldn't be further from the truth. You can hope all you want, but the system is designed to create inequality at higher and higher rates. As all the data from the last 50 years clearly shows. It is very simple to eradicate this problem. Simply make social inequality a crime. What are the laws for? To create justice right? So. There! It ends all the unsolvable problems of all societies and the World. The only problem is that the sociopaths won't have their golden cars and watches. Well we give them fake ones in their mental institutions.
The terribly sad thing is, in the eleven years since the talk was given, house prices have essentially doubled in the western world. Successive governments have done nothing to change this unfolding calamity. This increase in house prices has not been matched by wage growth, essentially making the wealth gap even more toxic.
It is very intriguing how these different health and social statistics, such as the proportion of imprisoned persons and life expectancy, are used in this video to distinguish the social differences which can be deduced from income inequality and gross national income per capita. This illustrates very clearly how income inequality, and not gross national income per capita, is the main driver of health and social problems in our society. This inequitable distribution of income widely prevalent in developed countries today, such as Canada in which we personally live, creates gaps in standards of living among different demographics. For our country as a whole, we can improve our quality of life by reducing income disparities, especially in the top 1%. We applaud the evaluation Richard Wilkinson provides about his own study and statistics near the end of the video, which give his statements greater credibility. The use of a variety of different countries and his justification for his choices support this as well. We believe that governments should act, not only in the interest of economic growth, but also in the interest of economic development, and pay attention to measures such as the human development index (HDI) in drafting and enacting their policies and budget. - Wilson and Pensee
Interesting video! It is fascinating to see how GNP per capita is much less of an indicator of economic well-being and how important relative income is between the various wealth classes. After seeing the social problems that income equality creates, it is increasingly clear that we should be focusing on solving the differences between wealth classes over this tunnel visioned mindset of increasing GNP per capita. Well done!
What if it's not "inequality causes social problems", it's "social problems cause inequality". That completely changes the discussion. If you believe the former, you believe in transfering wealth. If you believe the latter, you believe in helping people acquire their own wealth. What if income mobility isn't about society holding poor people back, but about some societies knowing how to properly motivate everyone. Causation matters tremendously here, but he only blew through it at the end.
@@abrechter1489 - Great question. To me, it's the core that was outlined at the founding of the US. A number of these were not properly implemented, such as slavery existing, women not being able to vote. Some have trouble to this day, such as proper legal defense when you're poor. However, this doesn't change these rights as the goal. It just means we're still working on them. That's different from those who say these rights don't work. They do, we just need to keep making them "more perfect" as with our union as a whole. The rights as I see them are below. There may be more. But it is always the rights of the individual to be free from the oppression of both the governance and the masses. Never the kinds of "rights" that involve transfers of wealth. Right to own property. (Foundation of capitalism) Right not to be owned as property. Freedom of/from religion. Freedom speech. Freedom of the press. Right to self-defense. (Including guns) Right against double jeopardy. Right against self-incrimination. Right to trial by jury of peers. Right to legal representation. (Even if you're poor) Right to a redress of grievances. Right against unreasonable search and seizure. Right to a speedy trial. Right against excessive bail. Right against excessive punishment. Right against cruel and unusual punishment. Right not to quarter soldiers. Right to vote. Right to run for and hold office.
These research findings are so important! How come every politician that wants to do good isn’t talking about this and acting on it!? We need to spread the word and make sure politicians know about this, and act on it, instead of serving their own greedy short sighted interests and those of their backers! The corresponding book is The Spirit Level.
@@TCt83067695 He specifies that it makes the largest difference at the bottom of the scale regarding lower income because it is a spectrum, looking at a social hierarchy.
@@Rosetteismyname correct. Many are physically wealthy but morally poor. Many develop mental issues aswell because they're not using thier wealth to improve society.
"Income means something very important within our societies but nothing between them " This video dives into the issues and consequences created by income inequality in our societies, and supports them with a variety and surplus of data and metrics. It was really eye-opening for myself. Never would I have thought that social dysfunction is related to income inequality, and social problems such as crime and suicide rates are also directly related to this inequality. Amazing video!
This is a great presentation that addresses many of the social and psychological issues that remain largely under-discussed on the topic of economic inequality.
One thing I noticed about the graphs is that the countries listed are all relatively developed. I wonder how the introduction of more LEDCs into these graphs would impact the correlations?
Notice how his graphs aren't consistent with what countries are excluded and included. Some are just missing Singapore-which is an exception to just about every one of his claims-and some are missing half the original 23.
I have noticed the same thing. Some countries are included and excluded in different graphs. And, Singapore was, in one graph, much less than USA, but in 7:45 it has higher inequality and imprisonment rate. He also speaks about data selection in 14:30.
@@The2ndUsername It still is subject to other variables. There's a ton of running hypothesises as to why places near the equator seem to be shittier (scientific term) than others. Trying to draw conclusions from a correlation without any other data to support them, is not scientific.
Yes. I want to say that I myself do value freedom and freedom from oppression. But Libertarians tend to ignore the effects of extreme income inequality.
Does anyone else notice how Singapore is stated as the country with the greatest levels of inequality but the conveniently absent rom all subsequent graphs until prisoners, then removed again?
Please just Google for the data on Singapore. It's all there. The guy above clearly doesnt know much or cherry picked his data. The reason why there are high prisoners per population is because Singapore has a good and trusted police force.
I was doing a research paper on Philosophy and topic was -is Business & ethics is oxymoron?" I realized this video topic connected to some extent. As I went deeper, I observed that there main driving factor is that Business targets are decided more so in board meetings or by a few top investors and they are more or less in oblivion (as id who cares attitude) of the means used to get to them. One passes the pressure to the other in line below to save his job. Nobody questions these goals feasibility. On the contrary, when business goals are set by people who are involved in decision making of running the operations, they tend to be more realistic about what is possible and at what cost. Income disparity is bound to grow, if goals are not reasoned with long term impact of absence of ethics in doing business. Support small businesses over large corporates, might help in the meantime.
Quite a person of many words I see. What are your thoughts on the taxation system that will best solve the problem of inequality without losing the 'incentive' associated with economic efficiency?
@@dwightstewart5211 His thoughts are that there isn't such a thing. Hard work and success is rewarded with money. Rich people are taxed too. Billionaires pay millions in taxes. Sure, their accountants know tricks to pay less taxes, but the common peasant can take advantage of tax breaks too. Why should successful people like Jeff Bezos have to give half his earnings to the government? He's earned his pay. He's created thousands of jobs. He created a company that benefits the world over. So what if he has more money than you. He had a better idea and work ethic than you. If you stifle the reward of commiting to a venture, you don't get the venture. Who's greedier? The rich person or the person who wants the rich person's money without having worked for it?
This is a great presentation that addresses many of the social and psychological issues that remain largely under-discussed on the topic of economic inequality.
Very good speech, made clear so everybody can understand easily. Conclusion is that we must spread our wealth more to become more prosperous as a society.
You are right, not all of them, but from the ones in the presentation: Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, USA Denmark, Germany, UK. That they are now atheist doesn´t mean they weren´t religious before. Weber made an study about how protestant work ethics made protestant countries develop more than catholic. Even now protestant countries are critic in the European crisis acording to this article
Great Video! We're summarizing this video as a part of our research into consequences of Economic Growth in economics, and we analyzed that: It was interesting to see how Gross National Income has no impact on life expectancy and other common factors attributed to Economic Development, yet, "income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them." The more inequality of income within a country, the worse the living conditions of the society (for example: Unicef index of child well-being, mental illness, high school drop out rate, etc.). Some recommended solutions included: increasing company-employee ownership, promoting more directors from within companies, stopping tax avoidance, ending tax havens, and making tax progressive again.
In addition to income inequality, he should look at the effect of cultural homogeneity on how well societies do. Some of the effects he attributes to income inequality may correlate equally well with cultural diversity.
I found a solution to the problem: "Commonwealth!" Here's an example of how: a talented entrepreneurs enjoys the challenge to create a successful business. He then sells it to his employees, who then become owners; i.e. don't depend anymore on unions and low wages. The entrepreneur gets his money back with some extra and starts a new venture... and again selling it to his employees etc. and every time the entrepreneur gets his money back with some extra and starts an even bigger venture... Gradually, we all become self-employed business owners! If then the more greedy ones own more, the less greedy ones won't envy them. Imagine how proud an entrepreneur then could be after having turned 2000 low wage earners into well to do business owners! So, why it is not happening? Because most (if not all) talented entrepreneurs suffer from sordid greed! They believe only their talents deserve all the materialistic riches in our world. :( Reason: They failed to dismantle their inherited/ or environmentally acquired negative traits and thus are unable to develop their full human potential! Are they not worried that their grossly selfish behavior in the long run might ignite yet another "Kristallnacht"?
I truly believe that there is more to life than materialistic greed. Let's remember: nature's laws burden the materialistic successful with the moral obligation to help alleviate the suffering of the materialistically poor. That's why, wouldn't it be smarter for the former to create and broaden a social safety net, which protects all citizens? - I mean, the least our wealthy capitalist society can afford is to secure the existence of every citizen! I am not asking too much, am I? It's not nobody's right to blame any individual for his materialistic misfortune. Even a drug addict is a citizen and human being, who deserves our help. The next step then should be to guide and encourage "a materialistic loser" to a better his/ her life. To some extent it's already implemented in some modern countries, such as in Europe, Canada, USA, Australia; albeit their social security is still fairly primitive, yet it points into the right direction... Yes, I did my share of philosophical pondering and insight originating about quality of life; even wrote a few (non-pious) books about it: The first one I titled: "A Guide To Personal Contentment", followed by a couple more, titled: "Grandpa's Insight". Goggle my name: Johannes K. Drinda
I see it rather this way: The "power of the Universe" (i.e. nature, not the God of any pious business organization) allowed or chose us humans to mange planet Earth, under the condition that we follow nature's laws. Thus, all our actions are monitored and rewarded or compensated, accordingly. Most economist's might dismiss my insight as "unsubstantiated palaver", albeit their account figures support my reasoning. Thus, if we mismanage and so, fail to cooperate with nature's laws our planet long enough, nature is going to give up on us and simply recycle us, for we are only an "insignificant dot" in the Universe. Therefore, we should regard ourselves as "nature's tools". The Universe doesn't need us, but we need the Universe. That's the deal. Yea, it's like with Putin's Russia: Putin now needs China, but China doesn't need Putin... :)
Yes, these are constructive and progressive trends. The problem is that many young people are taught to embrace materialism, use credit cards etc. and too busy paying their bills than to think of anything else. Capitalists aim to control the masses of philosophically confused (mostly young) people via one string and keep you entertained and bus, so, that you'll stay away from their materialistic aspirations and get it all their way. I'm already too old to be taken seriously by most young people, because according to them any person over the age of 70 is mentally senile. Little do they know that many mentally sane elders acquired lots of invaluable wisdom. You see, the true culprit of our socio-economic inequality is blatant, sordid greed of materialist and capitalists. They can't get their necks full enough! The more the own, the more they want and they don't care if their compatriots starve to death, yet they want your kids to join the army to defend the loot of the rich. Only occasionally we hear of millionaires coming to their senses and decide to give away lots of their excess cash; like the generous, caring Leonardo Julio Farkas, a Chilean businessman and philanthropist, who put's Chile's sordid politicians to shame.
+Joh Drinda If everyone owned businesses we wont have employees. The structure of the world and its economics is not perfect but in most cases it is workable and part of that is based on the fact that we as humans are individuals and we think different and want to be different. It is because of this diversity of mental make-up why some people are comfortable being employees while others are comfortable being criminals and other wont settle for nothing but wealth.
The Lazlo The workers, who would become owners, are already self-motivated, qualified professionals. Thus, they will enjoy fulfilling their individual interests while sharing them in a bigger context. On their own they wouldn't be able to run (for instance) a laboratory, an auto repair business, a supermarket etc.Thus, as individual employees they would not get far. I am almost sure that workers, who turned into business owners, would abandon their criminal ambitions. - Let's face it most criminals became criminals out of poverty; only a small percentage are mentally sick, who will eventually have to learn to "feel comfortable" in a mental asylum or jail! Besides, I once worked with a Hungarian boss, called "Lazlo Nemesh"... who offered me a job in his jewelry wholesale. We both would have been even better off if we would have both been owners of the business.
Artificial scarcity..., - ...is the prime factor among the majority of current existing and overall unnecessary suffering we see in Our World today caused by economic disparity... M.D. - A.D.
Yes, completely so. Where I grew up, the richer people looked down on the poorer and the poorer were jealous and had a distain towards the more wealthy. I never understood why people just can't get along.
Most important: Money education starts at home. Don't spend more than one earns. Save to weather bad times. No credit cards. Be a minimalist. Stop consuming, but producing. You can start growing vegetables even on your table.
True, if some things were up for discussion. I've had "discussions" who refused to acknowledge how per-capita systems work (insisting on only looking at a countries "full" number, no matter the country), or outright denying factual matters. You can't always reason with such people, nor can you expect people who are actually knowledgeable on an area to spend hours explaining basic information and principles to people.
I respect this guy for not picking sides wether or not redistribution and solalism works, and only objectively states the facts. The key here is not income equality. "Wealth" is more then just fiat dollars per hour, and means different things to different people. OPPORTUNITY and economic ENTRY equality is what needs to be equal. Meaning anyone who WANTS to work hard to become wealthy has a chance to use whatever skills they have to do so, without monoplies, legislation, favoritism
All he did was point out the existence of inequality, but didn't explain why it's there. He assumed that every derivative society measure was caused by inequality, when it's actually caused by what's causing the inequality. Once again he's proving the danger of using correlations. And as other comments have pointed out, using countries like Japan and Sweden is weak, given their homogenous cultures. As for blaming crime on punitive measures. Come on, be serious.
Nature made us this way. Life is built on the success and failures of humanity. If nature was equal, then there would be alot more human species still alive today.
I'm glad that at least a few comments point that out. What's scary is that the overwhelming majority of the audience doesn't see that. This is why it's so easy to spread trash theories.
The extreme inequality we have now favors extreme monopolies, the wealthy billionaires absorb all the money from the lower classes, store it away in fiscal heavens and so the money is not reinvested. Middle class people on the other hand reinvest almost all the money and so the businnes cycle continues. So, unless you tax away the extreme inequality we have now, you wont have prosperity, this is just 1+1. You have either a middle class economy or you have a billionaires and poor people economy, you cant have both. The "free market"-mantra is just pure ideology, not factual in the real world
We believe it is a wonderful video summarizing the correlation between wealth disparity and negative social effects. We overuse the values for GDP per capita, hence seeing no correlation and ending our analysis. We found it interesting how there is such a strong relationship between income inequality, a factor not usually considered when discussing infant mortality and life expectancy.
Nobody says that there are not people who are needy or in need of other peoples help. The question though is, does the government have to do it? Before Bismarck introduced social systems to better suppress the bottom part of society, as he openly said, we had better and cheaper and fairer systems. We should try to get back to private systems that compete with each other, with less waste, less cronyism and less corruption. 90% of the population was organized in mutual aid before gov destroyed it.
There is more to the story. Do a RUclips search on Fred Harrison, a British economist who has written extensively on how to end poverty and misery around the world. He has also produced a series of hard-hitting short documentary films.
Sorry to bump so late but you do realise that americans can never be denmark right? You are too diverse racially and culturally. Turns out diversity is not your strenght, who would have thought
a little envy is healthy. wanting others to have as bad as you is bad, wanting to have good like others and working throwards this is good... simple as that
It's crucial for economists to determine the level of inequality that does not hinder economic growth while maintaining a high level of satisfaction amongst the general populace
A lot of these graphs wouldn't pass for a middle school project! No citations of the conducted studies, plus half of these graphs use numeric values of "Low" and "High". I appreciate the argument he's making, but to prove your point you also need to prove that your information is believable.
It would have taken the speaker hours to include what TheOBXMULE suggests and I doubt he was allocated that much time by TED. Besides, this information is, I suspect, available on the internet. Google it!
A swedish study, translated: Students with few friends and low status in the class gets poorer health as adults. If there is unequal distribution of status in the class also affected health effects in adulthood, even for students with high status, according to research from the University of Stockholm. The students who had low status among their peers have a higher risk of being hospitalized for such mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, heart disease and diabetes. Wilkinson=correct!
In this video, Richard Wilkinson discusses the issue of how economic inequality harms society. We found it was very interesting that there is no correlation between gross national income and life expectancy. Countries like USA are twice as rich as countries like Israel and Portugal, yet there is no improvement in life expectancy. However, the correlation lies in income inequality in the economy. Countries with greater income inequality (ex. Portugal and USA) have a lower life expectancy than countries with little income inequality. In addition, there is a direct correlation between greater income inequality and great negative health and social problems. These problems include life expectancy, math and literacy rates, teenage pregnancy, addiction (drugs and alcohol), homicides, mental illness, and more. He shows that again, gross national income has no correlation with these health and social problems. Furthermore, Wilkinson points out that greater equality affects the top too, not just the bottom. There are better health and education benefits to both the top and bottom with equality. He then proposes solutions. For example, he states that stopping tax avoidance of the rich, having tax progression, and promoting more directors within economy will contribute towards greater equality. The main message that we think this TedTalk is showing is that quality of life in society can be greatly improved with economic equality. Angela and Ryan
Thank you for an interesting response....does correlation necessarily mean causation?? smoking is correlated with alcoholism, but doesn’t cause alcoholism... while smoking causes an increase in the risk of developing lung cancer. So does economic equality cause quality of life improvement? You may be interested in reading this blog...quite lengthy but very informative; www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/
It's so sickening how many of the people on the list of billionaires inherited their parents business. Hard work huh? I think not so much. Not when your parents die and hand over the already well run billion dollar business to you. The Koch family is a perfect example of this
Pretty much so in Japan. The inheritance tax is very high as compared to other developed nations. That is another factor why Japan is keeping the gap low.
Totally agreed. Inheritance tax should be 100% over $1 million. Everyone arguing against that licks boots. Maybe one day the rich will realize their opulence would be less disgusting if they didn't threaten their employees with homelessness and destitution and death in the streets in order to force us to work harder. Maybe one day there won't be more empty homes than there are people forced to live on the streets. Maybe one day the rich will realize that taxes are just guillotine insurance. But I wouldn't count on it. I think it's much more important to get together with friends and neighbors who are just as disgusted and do something about it. Direct action, mutual aid, union organizing, and independent education are all great tactics imo. Also, +Hector Vega look up how worker co-ops work. Spanish manufacturing giant Mondragon isn't perfect, but they're at least an example of how successful at growth co-ops can be if they focus on it. Economist Richard Wolff's organization Democracy at Work has a lot of good material on co-ops as well.
a currency where the volume is defined by the people who use it and the people who use it get to decide how much its worth, as well as an anarchy so that the market is truly free and the growth of wealth isn't stunted by government influence
Yes, break the monopoly of government on money. People could use gold backed currency or Ƀitcoins instead of inflationary fiat money. We have to get rid of the central banks. Currently this money printing by government is like an extra tax, robbing people.
5:05 The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That’s very important in poorer countries but not in the rich, developed world.” But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other matter very much.
Presumably because there wasn't any data for Singapore for the statistics on those charts. Different countries measure different things. Just try getting statistics on police shootings in the US, for instance.
@@DC-sy5zv You don't know anything about economics, for example, in Norway the quality of life is much better than in Singapore even when their per capita GDP are very similar (Norway is one of the most egalitarian and statist countries in the world) Source: www.google.com/amp/s/thehearttruths.com/2014/04/30/80-of-singaporeans-are-poorer-than-a-cleaner-in-norway/amp/
Theo-Retical Fair enough, i read the book in which he goes into much more detail about this issue, im not sure if he proves beyond any doubt but he does at least recognise and acknowledge this.
Yes of course not but one of the most telling labels of causation is multiple unrelated correlations leading to the same ends. How will we prove that people are more likely to commit crime or fall to the pressures of predispositioned mental illness under stress, and that stress is more severe in cases where the individual is reflective of social pressure? That would require intricate knowledge not only on the chemical reactions within the brain, but the full process of mRNA and it's interaction with personality. So we won't be seeing causality in things like this for a few years.. The best we can do is be philosophical and assume such things are true based on deductive evidence. So far that's true and therefore we should try to make changes in order to better our society. You can go ahead and still be skeptical, but most of the intelligent community is satisfied with this kind of reasoning for now, and we can of course go on without you.
Income inequality really does throw the concept of us all being equal out the window. How are you equal to me or my neighbors if you are a millionaire. How are you equal to us if the quality of food, size of your house, quality of your possessions and quality of life is so much better than ours? How are we equal?
Worth repeating for the third time: "Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals". Observe the same stress in (other) animals. “Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” -Plato Greek philosopher (427-347 B.C.)
The statistics make Japan seem like a model country, but it's far from it. There's a lot of poverty and mental illness in Japan, but people just don't talk about it. There's a saying that "the nail that sticks out always gets hammered down." If you're not like everybody else you are put to shame. Japan has a high suicide rate, death from overwork, and hikikomori (social shut-ins).
Bernie Sanders, the old jewish communist that wants to implement bread lines and free collage, free health care and free everything but forgetting to tell who's going to pay for it.
*college Sanders' supporters know exactly how it would be paid for. It's not our fault you resort to strawman arguments when you're to lazy/stupid to read about the bullshit you spread.
you sound a bit dumb Pawel, its not about getting rid of the poor, its about getting rid of poverty; material poverty for a start, that easy to achieve, spiritual poverty is a bit more complicated, cause some people just have ugly minds, no matter the size of their wallets.
In “Occupying Chairlifts” a simple rule tweak on inheritance ends up changing the direction and purpose of modern human life! Here’s a fair way to transition forward to where we’re rewarded for cooperating and creating instead of competing and conquering. It's something specific we can demand. If this isnt the best answer, at least we’re thinking about what might be. Are we really just this close to having it work right? Oh yeah, it's a Ski movie! “Occupying Chairlifts” on RUclips!
We are products of our environment, broken homes, poor education, no healthcare, nutrition less food, heavy taxation, burdensome housing, false scarcity, high unemployment, concentrated wealth. It's easy when people are fearful, disorganized, feeling separate. They want us to fight amongst ourselves so we can be vulnerable to demagogues who will say it's because of government, immigrants, blacks,when in actuality we are all struggling over a smaller and smaller share of a bigger AND BIGGER pie.
Blake Rees dubious choice of language...you mean the pharmaceutical business? That's a discussion for another day. Why do they have a healthy economy? Is it because they have "good business initiative", or because they've destroyed any regime that tried to build its own currency and systematically monopolised almost the entire global banking system ?
Blake Rees furthermore, how exactly are your facetious points related to economic inequality and my argument that Israel is one of the richest, not the poorest in the world?
I don't agree at all with what Richard Wilkinson said in this video. I don't know the reality of all countries that were referred on this video, but I do about Portugal. Looking just to that data presented on this video, Richard Wilkinson tells us social problems existent on Portugal are related with the inequality; looking around me, I see that problem differently. We have problems in our society not because the differences between rich and poor, but because the portuguese people doesn't know how to properly behave! The great majority of the portuguese people is intolerant, revengeful and doesn't like to behave accordingly the law! The portuguese people doesn't like to pay taxes, doesn't like to actively participate in our common problems' resolution and above anything else, when they have an opinion, they don't change it even if they are shown proves of the opposite working better. Having a more equal society in Portugal wouldn't solve a thing, once all the problems with alcohol abuse, drugs abuse, thievery and so on would remain. And how do I know it? Because I look around me at the university, for example, and I see students that come from wealthy families abusing on alcohol, abusing on drugs, misbehaving and being violent too. More family income doesn't change a thing.
People become more intolerant and cranky when they feel that, despite their best efforts, they're not getting anywhere. When you work hard, get an education and do all the right things but still can't make more than basic survival, and sometimes not even that, you get disheartened and demoralised. Multiply that situation by the millions and you get a big social problem.
Trust me the world runs on this methods, where do you think you get all the necessities from? Without the first capitalists who were willing to take risky and costly projects, where are you now? Nights without bulbs, walking without cars. Do you think these technology just came out of nowhere?
Eugene Rider I'm sick of the argument of the capitalism creates technology. NO Technologies always result from understanding laws of nature and then by engineering them applying them. Capitalism is just a method in which we ensure some people get access to the resources and others do not; look at the world it's clearly indicated in the state of things. Capitalism claims scarcity is the reason for the necessity of this economic model that historically requires growth and the destruction of the environment because it's an externality in their narrow monetary thinking. We have the technical capacity to create a world of abundance for more than probably 10 billion while not over stressing the environment if we used a rational system that seeks to create abundance and maintain dynamic equilibrium with the environment. The intelligent use of our resources could end poverty. And poverty is the root cause of many other problems like crime for example. Www.thevenusproject.com
Sigh, no way you're going to end poverty. I'd love to see you do that in the next 100 years or maybe you can use the green tech to prolong your life to 1000 years. I was not saying Capitalism creates tech, I said, capitalsim provides methods for tech to produce. And you said it either. And green and recyclable fuels and energy are exactly what current industry is heading to.
Correlation doesn’t automatically mean causation. I’d love an actual explanation from this guy, or anyone else for that matter, on how exactly wealth inequality leads to these things. You can have wealth equality but everyone is dirt poor - you’re telling me this is beneficial? I laugh.
+badpanda84 Wrong. Norway and Sweden and Scandanavia have wealth distribution that isn't equal - 7 to 1, 6 to 1, 13 to 1. But in the USA the average CEO makes 300x that of the average worker.
Ahh, so you're saying mixed economies, where socialist policies take certain things off the table so that people don't take advantage of people, and capitalist policies stimulate economic growth by competition?
+J Beezers "Norway, Sweden and scandinavia" (Norway and Sweden are parts of Scandinavia - Kingdom of Norway, Sweden and Denmark) are capitalist societies. You argument is invalid.
No Anzus, the argument is not invalid because his argument was not the Sweden and Scandinavia are not capitalist societies. He was pointing out that those countries have a mixed economy that works to keep income inequality from a minimum. You can have people that earn more earning 7 times the people that earn less, instead of 300 times.
The 0,1 richest people in Norway have above one hundred times more wealth than the general public, so no, they are far from equal. Still not too bad compared to the US
Psst.. this isn’t the place for thinking or logic based reasoning. It’s where people come to be shellacked in a coat of superiority made of their own inner sense of inferiority. It’s where envy is made into a moral virtue. After which, we can all sleep peacefully knowing that our lives are meaningless, that we can do nothing to improve our lives, and that anyone whose life does have meaning and whose actions have improved their life must be sacrificed - because they don’t fit nicely onto our premade color coordinated scatter plots.
I feel really sad for mankind when I see videos like this one and how vast majority of people believe this. It is easy to blame factors that are out of our control when we don't feel successful, but as easy as it is, it is also dangerous. These videos indoctrinate people to feel abused by the rich, to think that some socialist political elites will somehow make everyone rich and successful without even trying, and eventually they make you vote for socialists even though the socialist economical doctrines are those that support big business and real inequality in the first place. How misguided this is! To illustrate the cluelesness of the man speaking, just listen to him when he discusses the criticism in the end. When he gets to discus correlation v. causality, which is a MAJOR flaw of this theory, he just says that they've put a lot of thought in it and that you simply have to believe him. Not a single word of evidence. Way to go! The best thing everyone can do for themselves is to think for themselves! Don't let others tell you, that if you've been born poor, you will die poor, unless some socialist politician makes your boss pay you twice as much. That's not how it works. We've seen these ideas crash and burn many times before. Yet somehow, modern day communists like Piketty are the best-selling authors in the field of economy.
***** Did I say anything about me knowing that? The problem is that I don't know that and where he is supposed to give proof, he requests trust. He himself said that his theory has been criticised for this issue and what does he say upon this criticism? That they spent a lot of time thinking about it and they know it now so you have to believe them. Proving causality requires some data work and obviously I don't have the data nor am I willing to put that much time into it but that does not mean that I have to believe everything that might sound good at first glance. You might come up with various theories that explain the same thing and that's all they are. Just theories without data support (and yes, data can also be fixed sou you should always be cautious when receiving information anyway). But in nowadays world it is not that important whether your arguments are logically sound. There is a tremendous amount of people who just want to hear that free market economy is a culture of greedy pigs. That the system is somehow stacked against the poor and therefore it's not their fault they're poor. And there's lots of people who would be happy to just have the successful ones crippled somehow so the gap is not that big. Most political parties in Europe and the US are aware of this and they never hesitate to use it for their own gains. Just look around the world. Western world is starting to limp behind because there's so many people who lost their trust in themselves and put all the hope in some politician who promised to take care of them. Sadly, it is a naive thing to do. And so we now live in the world where China is becoming the worlds largest economy, Europe took a bite too large for them when they tried to make Ukraine to lean towards west, the US is at the threshold of yet another huge crisis, even though CNN is telling you just the opposite. I live in a country where under the influence of Soviet Union we were trying to make everyone equal. I can tell you that this pretended equality only caused a total breakdown of ethics because you know, there always are groups that are more equal. Now after 25 years the society still isn't healed. Yet we are facing these new communists who promise to bring equality that solves everything. Have a nice day!
This video is indoctrinate people? lol, Ok, lets apply the indoctrinating factor. People born and raised in a culture all their lives, 20, 30, 50 years, whatever, that culture tells them X is good.. Something comes along and questions X’s validity, the natural response is to what? Listen with an open mind or attack because it is not the norm? History shows it to be the latter. I find it odd and sad how people can pull anything out from what they see. Nothing in this vid attacks the rich. It is simply pointing out the differences between societies and the byproducts of those differences based on evidence. The guy says even rich people do better in equality societies. How can that possibly be looked at blaming the rich? As far as voting, when information like this starts showing up on main stream news day after day, year after year, the same way other topics are like war, gay marriage and immigrants maybe I will give your socialist plot a second look. Until then, please stop. What I got from this is we should look at the society, what it produces, is it positive or negative and what can be done to change it. Think for yourselves you say? That is a bit vague. Thinking requires information. Not just information that makes you feel safe and comfortable. Of all sorts. Then you must evaluate it objectively. Follow the sources and over time arrive and a conclusion. Not based on what you want it to be, but what it actual is. Anyone thinking for themselves and not taking the steps to make sure what they are thinking is true can and will go around in circles, confirmation bias and all. My goodness man, you people are the problem that don’t like seeing evidence that clashes with your establish world view. If you don’t like it, by all means please provide counter studies with mounting evidence to prove otherwise instead of accusations, conjecture, assumptions and assertions without evidence. That is how real progress is made. Good luck.
moety2 Okay, we are in an internet discussion and for every answer you want an in-depth study? Eh, sure... Now to the points you make (by the way neither you do provide "studies with mounting evidence"): 1. You are right that people "attack because it is not the norm" many ideas. But this inequality rant seems to be the norm if you look for example at the like/dislike counter under this video. So when i disagree with it, I believe that I do violate this "norm" and therefore I can expect stuff thrown at me and I'm okay with that but you should be more careful about your points because to me, they seem to be aimed against you. 2. "Nothing in this vid attacks the rich." Again, you are right. He does not say we should kill the rich and steal their endownments. But you can't dispute that he presents inequality as a problem for whatever reason. Now when you have identified the problem, what remains is to come up with a solution. You can do it either by making the poor richer or by making the rich poorer or both. And which solution is proposed more commonly? Higher taxation of the rich or using whips on the poor to make them work harder so they are worth more money? The problem is that if you implement extremely high taxation of the rich (like France for example who steals about three quarters of some people's income), they work less or stop working at all (or move their business elsewhere which, for a given country, is the same as if they stopped making money). The tax revenue therefore does not rise at best and nobody is made better off because you don't collect more taxes to provide for the poor. So the net result is that the rich have less, poor are still poor, and sure, the gap is smaller or in other words there is less inequality. Other very common proposal to shrink the rich-poor gap is to raise the minimum wage. The problem here is that if you make McDonalds pay their workers 15 dollars per hour, they will have to either raise prices and therefore shut some restaurants and fire people or automatize (develop or buy machines to replace workers) and fire some of the people as well. Some are made better off because they get a raise but society as a whole is made worse off because part of the people is fired and the raises are offset by higher prices. 3. "Thinking requires information. Not just information that makes you feel safe and comfortable." You are right for the third time. I am afraid, however, that you are the one who flows with the mainstream opinion and accuses others who dare to oppose it to be the problem because they don't like these correlation "proofs" of the opinions you happen to agree with. You are also deeply mistaken if you believe that "real progress" will be made if some people in public universities (preferably dealing with social studies or Keynesian economy, right?) will come up with a solution to inequality. People are born unequal both in terms of surroundings and abilities. I myself come from very humble surroundings (bottom 10 % in an Eastern-European country) but I'd rather chose to employ my abilities to get a better life for me than to hope for some social experiment with aim to reduce inequality to save me. You can choose otherwise and I wish good luck to you too.
He talks a lot about not picking and choosing data, but Singapore only seem to appear on the graphs that prove his point. I'm sure Singapore does well on many social indicators despite the income inequality.
A thousand people with a million dollars to invest in the economy is far better than one person with a billion dollars to invest because the billionaire will hedge his risk by investing 500 million and hoard the rest
In developed economy, investing in shares and securities give tax economization. Loss on share trading offsets one's income. The system itself is fraudulant.
![Stromae, Pomme - “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1F3OGIFnW1k/mqdefault.jpg)
Time marks and quotes
0:20 “I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What’s changed is we can now look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does.”
0:52 “I want to start though, with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against Gross National Income. How rich countries are on average and you see the countries on the right like Norway and USA are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, and Portugal on the left and it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There’s no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This again is life expectancy. These are small areas of England and Whales, the poorest on the right, the richest on the left, not a difference between the poor and the rest of us, even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top.
1:40 “So income means something very important within our societies and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that within our societies we’re looking at relative income or social position, social status, where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. And as soon as you’ve got that idea you should immediately wonder ‘What happened if we widened the differences, or compressed them, make the income differences bigger or smaller?
3:10 *(Graph) Index of Social Problems and Inequality:
-Life expectancy
-Math & Literacy
-Infant mortatlity
-Homicides
-Imprisonment
-Teenage births
-Trust
-Mental Illness, including drug & alcohol addiction
-Social Mobility
3:50 “The more unequal countries doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It’s an extraordinary close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, Gross National Income, there’s nothing there.”
4:45 *(Graph) “Child well-being is better in more equal countries”
5:05 “What all the data I’ve shown you so far says the same thing. The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That’s very important in poorer countries but not in the rich, developed world.”
5:35 *(Graph) “People in more unequal countries trust each other less”
“Here for instance this is trust. It’s simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted, comes from the World Values Survey. You see at the more unequal end it’s about 15% of the population who feel they can trust others. But in the more equal societies it rises to 60% or 65%.”
6:05 “I may say we did all this work twice. We did it first on these rich, developed countries. And then as a separate test bed we repeated it all on the 50 American states. Asking just the same question, do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures.”
6:30 “Basically we found that almost anything that’s related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the states and that’s a separate test bed. We’re not just talking about a fluke.”
6:45 *(Graph) “Mental illness is more common in more unequal societies”
“This is mental illness. W.H.O. put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. This (new graph) is the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. And it goes from about 8% up to 3x that. Whole societies with 3x the mental illness of others. And again, closely related to inequality.”
7:18 *(Graph) Homicide rates are higher in more unequal US states and Canadian provinces
“This is violence. These red dots are American states and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. But look at the scale of the differences. It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150.”
7:35 *(Graph) “This is the proportion of the population in prison. There’s about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side, but it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. In some places that’s part of it. But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. And the more unequal societies are also more likely also to retain the death penalty.”
8:05 *( Graph) More children drop out of High School in more unequal US states
“Here we have children dropping out of high school. Again, quite big differences, extraordinarily damaging. If you’re talking about using the talents of the population.”
8:15 *(Graph) Social mobility is lower in more unequal countries
“This is social mobility. It’s actually a measure of mobility based on income. Basically it’s asking do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? And at the more unequal end father’s income is much more important, in the UK, USA. In the Scandinavian countries father’s income is much less important. There’s more social mobility. And as we like to say and I know there’s a lot of Americans in the audience here, if Americans want to live the American dream they should go to Denmark.”
9:05 “They’re all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient but there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries. Not just a little bit worse but anything from twice as common to ten times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that.”
9:38
“In graph after graph we find that countries that do worse whatever the outcome seem to be the more unequal ones. And the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. So what we’re looking at is general social dysfunction related to inequality. It’s not just one or two things that go wrong. It’s most things.
11:00 “I’m not talking about perfect equality. I’m talking about what exists in rich, developed market democracies.”
11:10 “And now we’re in a really surprising part of this picture. Is that it’s not just the poor who are affected by inequality. There seems to be some truth in John Dunn’s ‘No man is an island’.
11:25 *(Graph) The benefits of greater equality are not confined to the poor but extend to all social classes
“In a number of studies it’s possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy.”
11:32 *(Graph) Infant mortality by class: Sweden compared with England & Wales
12:20 “The biggest difference is at the bottom of society. But even at the top there seems to be a small benefit to a more equal society. We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. And that seems to be the general picture. That greater equality makes most difference at the bottom but has some benefits even at the top.”
12:45 What’s going on? Psycho-Social affects
13:30 *(Graph) What kind of stressful tasks raise stress hormones most?
14:40 Some Questions:
-Is this just picking and choosing data?
-What about other countries?
-Why not control for other factors?
-What about causality?
15:30 “What about causality? Correlation in itself doesn’t prove causality. We spend a good bit of time and indeed people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. The big change in our understanding of drivers of health in the rich, developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is, affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on.”
16:10 *(Graph) What can be done?
Increase differences before tax:
-Increase company democracy-employee ownership etc
-Promote more directors from within companies
Taxes & benefits:
-Stop tax avoidance
-End tax havens
-Make taxation progress again
16:25 “I think the take home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. Suddenly we have a handle on the psycho-social well-being whole societies and that’s exciting.”
The French Revolution took place against the aristocrats taking advantage over the poor. At least the French poor of that time had guts to revolt. These days, the mankind are so heavily programmed to believe one has to have money and education to protest against the Gov't and establishment. The mankind lost self-determination. That is the root cause of all the human problems. ''Gutless Society''.
@@wisepersonsay3142 Misinformed society, more like it.
My professor asked to watch this video for the assignment and comment on it. Thank you so much, you saved my time.
Wow, thank you!!
@@wisepersonsay3142 it was a ewvoulrion set up by bankers tisk
anyone doing their godalming college homework
Davinder Misra Me 👋🏻
Yep :)
Yep!
we have a fucking exam based on this
Soca warrior 😂 that’s some bullshit bro
My mom is a teacher who owns her own home but is single, and we struggled. I have worked full-time since the age of fifteen and have paid into SS since age thirteen. I have never got in trouble in my entire life. I was in the Navy as a field hospital corpsman and now am a veteran who is 20% disabled. I get less than $300 per month with 20%. I was an LPN before going back to school, and at age 38, I will graduate with my BSW. I will still not be able to afford to purchase a home, and since my husband died, I can't make a high enough salary to support myself with my two children. I didn't grow up with a father or male figure. Females have a difficult time getting ahead. Nothing is equal in the United States.
You act like men have everything just handed to them and never struggle
Every GCSE and A-Level Economics class has watched this video when you start the topic on Inequality and Poverty. No doubt the teacher will pause before every graph and the multi-choice test will come next. Classic.
Having my exam tomorrow
@@davgg9621 hof, good luck man
and Sociology for Marxist views
@@LockedInVon If you study sociology or social epidemiology as Richard Wilkinson does and you aren’t using a marxist analytical framework you’re likely an idiot
I watched this around 8 years ago and it stuck with me like nothing else. It has completely changed the way that I think about the world.
Hopefully, this will happen in enough people to make a difference.
I think what changed your way of looking at the world was either your lack of economic understanding so he can lie to you nonstop and you believe it or your doctor gave you a lobotomy when you werent looking.
Because what he isnt giving you information about in this video is how economy works in reality, to start a business you need investors, but now you have redistributed too much money so there are no investors. So no new jobs are created, so wage growth stops dead in its track while inflation takes over and your income which doesent increase is worth 2% less every year, and in 20 years time you have to sell your house just to feed yourself, sadly you bought it for 500,000 and today you sell it for 50k leaving you with a bank loan of 450k.... so you cant afford to feed yourself so you starve to death when your 40-50.
You helped everyone a lot here didnt you.
Really? As if personal choices is not the driving factor?
The video is 10 years old now, and uni students like me are still dropping in due to our darn assignments lmao
Very good ted talk though
Sad thing is we now all know. . .but nothing will be done about it
6:40 While the trend is correct, the measuring system is not fool proof (be it surveys or census). Because they are culture dependent.
For instance, in Japan, majority of people or even doctors still don't recognise mental illness/depression as a legitimate medical problem. Hence you would obviously have low mental illness reports, because they don't even report in the first place! Even though majority of employees in Japan are overworked, and have depression, they don't even recognise it. That's the issue.
I'm Japanese and I agree with you about that.
But by that logic, you would have to exclude every country. Because every country is different in their culture, which would influence the result differently. Thus making them all unable to be compared.
In the end there is no perfect way to compare them. Thus it's better to use one measurement for all. Making them somewhat comparable.
A very informative video with great primary source statistics! It was fascinating to learn about the social and economic impacts that greater wealth inequality between the lower and upper class on society will have on developed countries; Wilkinson mentioned problems such as high crime rates, higher population with obesity, lack of government trust, and drug addiction that were associated with high-income inequality which are undesirable. It's a real shame that many developed countries such as the UK and the United States are unable to address this issue with solutions. Furthermore, it would have been nice if the speaker highlighted specific government policies or examples that would reduce inequality.
And this is more health costs at the end!! More people with obesity with the health problems that go together like diabetis, heart problems. And more mentally ill people means more laboral and health costs!! Laboral because they cannot work and health because they need medicación go to the doctor! More prisioners means more prison costs too
Different taxes. That one should be obvious. Socialism!
Get government out of the way- not more in the way
This guy has everything backwards. High crime rates, obesity, mental health issues and drug use cause inequality and not the other way around.
Scandinavia has less inequality because population has no diversity. Change population there and have people from poor countries and it will have same inequalities.
He is in the business of fooling people without critical thinking with data.
How many people will clap or like my presentation if I say your life in the long term is about your choices and not about how rich or poor your neighbors are.
Populist ideas are always liked by people and such ideas cause inequality and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.
@@searchwikipediafallacy5567I think it is you who has gotten the wrong end of the stick, old boy.
What is it about this data that makes people react how they do? What is at stake, what would be gained or lost by accepting that this may be true?
It seems that some viewers feel threatened by the idea that there is something negative about current arrangements in rich developed countries.
But are they saying that they believe that large inequalities should be defended for some reason?
I think it's because they would need to accept that they adapted themselves to a broken system. Therefore accept that they are "broken". In a way...
conditioning
Di Smith Some people are worried about this and it affecting equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. People are worried about how it will affect employability in the future.
Some countries don't like being evaluated in any negative way. This is especially bad for some people in the U.S. where jingoism is pretty prevalent. If they don't see their country as the best in the world they take it personally whereas they should not.
Here as a 30 years old, looking over the comments like a history lesson. Half of my lifetime gone since the release of this piece.
So, nothing really changed after 12 years, hasn't it?
It doesn't feel as though merely liking, favoriting, and sharing this adequetly expresses how awesome this video is. I think it might be the best Ted Talk I've ever seen.
Really well presented case. I like that he goes to the data rather than rely on personal testimonies to argue his point, unlike in most other TED talks.
What do the numbers mean mason?
This is absolutely one of the most important videos there are in the internet!
This is one of the most idiotic videos there are in the internet.
The speaker is assuming that there is a fixed pie of wealth. That if someone gets rich, that must mean someone else has to get poorer. That is false.
He never did that kind of assumption. It is not about how rich someone is it is about how big is the gap between richest and the poorest.
And even though he would have said something like that it would be completelly true. There is only so much money so if someone has it, someone else doesn't have it.
You might wanna check out this: gawker.com/rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer-1631000921?fb_action_ids=10203633878780046&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
(and the links)
It shows how richer are getting richer as poorest are going to be even poorer.
This is not a subject of opinion.
WMfin ""There is only so much money so if someone has it, someone else doesn't have it.""
Man, you're so stupid. Study some basic economics. The money supply always grow in order to accommodate the growing supply of good and services. The Government printsIf the money supply isn't growing, then how com we have inflation? You see how stupid you are?
If a businessman earns $50 billion, that means there is additional $50 billion in the economy in the form of additional cash and goods and services.
And billionaires do NOT keep billions of cash under their mattresses. They INVEST their billions in new factories and companies that create new products and more jobs. And even if they just put money in the bank, the bank doesn't hoard the money. It loans out the money to other people. So money is circulated.
Learn some basic economics, liberal socialist fool
Why do you have to call me with names?
Still, even though money is in motion being circulated the system getting money is taking it away from someone else. If you use word "earns" it means it is away from someone. If a businessman loans it, well I think you are well aware how it is just numbers in bit-space and there is no money in the system to cover interest.
And what it comes to seeing billionaires as a saviours. Well, take a look at the world and tell me how much good they are doing with 40% of earth's resources to poorest 40% of people.
By the time newly created money has fallen to poorer class it has already lost it's value and new money crisis is at the door.
AND since I am stupid liberal socialist, just today I read how rightwing-fools here in Finland didn't like the trade union movement because because of them people are getting too much money. Still I can't believe that those kind of people would do normal job even with that wage doubled.
204 ancap cult followers disliked after molyneux's commands.
This fits very well with what the statistics show. It does not matter about how rich you are, it is the fact that your position in the system is very important and that you do not spend much time truly socializing with people at a lower level of social position. Social stratification and the mistrust that follows can lead to stuff such as what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The issue of income disparity is often overlooked by many. Even if people do realize such disparity, there is no clear solution. As people act according to their own interests, higher taxation on the rich would only create conflicts between the upper class and the government. Thus, the government should implement a combination of policies to ameliorate the issue. Hopefully, situations have been improved in the last 8 years
You couldn't be further from the truth. You can hope all you want, but the system is designed to create inequality at higher and higher rates. As all the data from the last 50 years clearly shows.
It is very simple to eradicate this problem. Simply make social inequality a crime. What are the laws for? To create justice right? So. There! It ends all the unsolvable problems of all societies and the World.
The only problem is that the sociopaths won't have their golden cars and watches. Well we give them fake ones in their mental institutions.
There is a clear solution, just some people will actively impede it
If only every single soul in Brazil could hear and understand this...it is not your fault.
The terribly sad thing is, in the eleven years since the talk was given, house prices have essentially doubled in the western world. Successive governments have done nothing to change this unfolding calamity. This increase in house prices has not been matched by wage growth, essentially making the wealth gap even more toxic.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with income inequality
@@dougking5703 Well we will see about that, as the next century unfolds, some inequality will always exist - more a question of scale.
@@joshlicht1359 we all choose different paths so u certainly can't expect equality. Everyone has 24hr 7 days a week. It's what u do with it
@@dougking5703you are so naive
@@thechumbucket8986 you're the naive one lol
It is very intriguing how these different health and social statistics, such as the proportion of imprisoned persons and life expectancy, are used in this video to distinguish the social differences which can be deduced from income inequality and gross national income per capita. This illustrates very clearly how income inequality, and not gross national income per capita, is the main driver of health and social problems in our society. This inequitable distribution of income widely prevalent in developed countries today, such as Canada in which we personally live, creates gaps in standards of living among different demographics. For our country as a whole, we can improve our quality of life by reducing income disparities, especially in the top 1%. We applaud the evaluation Richard Wilkinson provides about his own study and statistics near the end of the video, which give his statements greater credibility. The use of a variety of different countries and his justification for his choices support this as well. We believe that governments should act, not only in the interest of economic growth, but also in the interest of economic development, and pay attention to measures such as the human development index (HDI) in drafting and enacting their policies and budget.
- Wilson and Pensee
Interesting video! It is fascinating to see how GNP per capita is much less of an indicator of economic well-being and how important relative income is between the various wealth classes. After seeing the social problems that income equality creates, it is increasingly clear that we should be focusing on solving the differences between wealth classes over this tunnel visioned mindset of increasing GNP per capita. Well done!
You deserve to live in Jia Bian Gou.
I think that this video highlights an integral part of sustainability i.e. everything is connected.
+David Wardrop This will stand the test of time and will be taught in schools in about 5-10 years.
it might be tought in schools regardless if it stands the test of time, e.g. mandatory social studies and gender fluidity
Basically what trauma informed systems will teach you and that is now being taught through all law enforcement and psychology professionals now
What if it's not "inequality causes social problems", it's "social problems cause inequality". That completely changes the discussion. If you believe the former, you believe in transfering wealth. If you believe the latter, you believe in helping people acquire their own wealth. What if income mobility isn't about society holding poor people back, but about some societies knowing how to properly motivate everyone. Causation matters tremendously here, but he only blew through it at the end.
Ok but we know it is the first one, because inequality increased in the US after Reagan and things only got really worse after him.
@@adrianhutabarat1736 Why do you guarantee that inequality is the only reason for that??
What if its a positive feedback loop like CO2 and global average temperature?
Hypothetically, what policies would you implement to change social problems?
@@abrechter1489 - Great question. To me, it's the core that was outlined at the founding of the US. A number of these were not properly implemented, such as slavery existing, women not being able to vote. Some have trouble to this day, such as proper legal defense when you're poor. However, this doesn't change these rights as the goal. It just means we're still working on them. That's different from those who say these rights don't work. They do, we just need to keep making them "more perfect" as with our union as a whole. The rights as I see them are below. There may be more. But it is always the rights of the individual to be free from the oppression of both the governance and the masses. Never the kinds of "rights" that involve transfers of wealth.
Right to own property. (Foundation of capitalism)
Right not to be owned as property.
Freedom of/from religion.
Freedom speech.
Freedom of the press.
Right to self-defense. (Including guns)
Right against double jeopardy.
Right against self-incrimination.
Right to trial by jury of peers.
Right to legal representation. (Even if you're poor)
Right to a redress of grievances.
Right against unreasonable search and seizure.
Right to a speedy trial.
Right against excessive bail.
Right against excessive punishment.
Right against cruel and unusual punishment.
Right not to quarter soldiers.
Right to vote.
Right to run for and hold office.
An excellent piece of work!
Loved this, his charts transcend minorities and it breaks down the notion that the USA is "the greatest country on earth."
These research findings are so important! How come every politician that wants to do good isn’t talking about this and acting on it!? We need to spread the word and make sure politicians know about this, and act on it, instead of serving their own greedy short sighted interests and those of their backers!
The corresponding book is The Spirit Level.
Any sociology students here? Or just economics?
Yees
I'm a fucking engineering student
Psychology
Yes. My Ninth Grade "World" History / Geography class felt more like an "America is best" class.
It's because they teach it in school.
"it's not just the poor who are effected by income inequality "
@John Dwyer huh?
@@TCt83067695 He specifies that it makes the largest difference at the bottom of the scale regarding lower income because it is a spectrum, looking at a social hierarchy.
Oh those poor rich people
@@Rosetteismyname correct. Many are physically wealthy but morally poor. Many develop mental issues aswell because they're not using thier wealth to improve society.
"Income means something very important within our societies but nothing between them
"
This video dives into the issues and consequences created by income inequality in our societies, and supports them with a variety and surplus of data and metrics. It was really eye-opening for myself. Never would I have thought that social dysfunction is related to income inequality, and social problems such as crime and suicide rates are also directly related to this inequality. Amazing video!
This is a great presentation that addresses many of the social and psychological issues that remain largely under-discussed on the topic of economic inequality.
One thing I noticed about the graphs is that the countries listed are all relatively developed. I wonder how the introduction of more LEDCs into these graphs would impact the correlations?
Notice how his graphs aren't consistent with what countries are excluded and included. Some are just missing Singapore-which is an exception to just about every one of his claims-and some are missing half the original 23.
I have noticed the same thing. Some countries are included and excluded in different graphs. And, Singapore was, in one graph, much less than USA, but in 7:45 it has higher inequality and imprisonment rate.
He also speaks about data selection in 14:30.
Or there just wasn't data.
This is what broke the Libertarianism spell for me
So you decided you want your neighbours Porche???
dude... come on, you ended up watching this video somehow, you gotta be more educated than that!?
@@The2ndUsername It still is subject to other variables. There's a ton of running hypothesises as to why places near the equator seem to be shittier (scientific term) than others. Trying to draw conclusions from a correlation without any other data to support them, is not scientific.
Yes. I want to say that I myself do value freedom and freedom from oppression. But Libertarians tend to ignore the effects of extreme income inequality.
I am glad to hear it. Welcome to Team Reality.
First-class speaker.
Would like to have an update of this after all the "crisis" the world faces now.
Tks Mr. Wilknson! You are a especial people in the world!!
Nice to see he put on a brand new shirt for the speach. :D
He got paid from the rest of the Communist want to be's
Does anyone else notice how Singapore is stated as the country with the greatest levels of inequality but the conveniently absent rom all subsequent graphs until prisoners, then removed again?
Not removed. There just wasn't data.
Please just Google for the data on Singapore. It's all there. The guy above clearly doesnt know much or cherry picked his data.
The reason why there are high prisoners per population is because Singapore has a good and trusted police force.
I'm sure he's talking a lot of sense but I'm so distracted by the creases he got when he took his shirt straight out of the packet & put it on.
I was doing a research paper on Philosophy and topic was -is Business & ethics is oxymoron?" I realized this video topic connected to some extent. As I went deeper, I observed that there main driving factor is that Business targets are decided more so in board meetings or by a few top investors and they are more or less in oblivion (as id who cares attitude) of the means used to get to them. One passes the pressure to the other in line below to save his job. Nobody questions these goals feasibility. On the contrary, when business goals are set by people who are involved in decision making of running the operations, they tend to be more realistic about what is possible and at what cost. Income disparity is bound to grow, if goals are not reasoned with long term impact of absence of ethics in doing business. Support small businesses over large corporates, might help in the meantime.
看了幾十場Ted演講的中文翻譯，台灣的翻譯水準屌打簡體字版本不知幾倍以上！👍
Great video. Knowing the consequences of inequality is the first step to solving it.
Quite a person of many words I see. What are your thoughts on the taxation system that will best solve the problem of inequality without losing the 'incentive' associated with economic efficiency?
@@dwightstewart5211 His thoughts are that there isn't such a thing. Hard work and success is rewarded with money. Rich people are taxed too. Billionaires pay millions in taxes. Sure, their accountants know tricks to pay less taxes, but the common peasant can take advantage of tax breaks too. Why should successful people like Jeff Bezos have to give half his earnings to the government? He's earned his pay. He's created thousands of jobs. He created a company that benefits the world over. So what if he has more money than you. He had a better idea and work ethic than you. If you stifle the reward of commiting to a venture, you don't get the venture. Who's greedier? The rich person or the person who wants the rich person's money without having worked for it?
This is a great presentation that addresses many of the social and psychological issues that remain largely under-discussed on the topic of economic inequality.
thank you TED. Insightful & powerful
Hi Shae MacMillan, you can to watch video about Inequality in Income with Berni Sanders, recorded one month ago,
Regards from Spain,
Oscar.
Fantastic video. Thank you for sharing.
Very good speech, made clear so everybody can understand easily. Conclusion is that we must spread our wealth more to become more prosperous as a society.
By "spread our wealth more", you mean "Forcibly take away a lot of the stuff of those that have more", I assume?
you first
You are right, not all of them, but from the ones in the presentation: Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, USA Denmark, Germany, UK. That they are now atheist doesn´t mean they weren´t religious before. Weber made an study about how protestant work ethics made protestant countries develop more than catholic. Even now protestant countries are critic in the European crisis acording to this article
Great Video!
We're summarizing this video as a part of our research into consequences of Economic Growth in economics, and we analyzed that:
It was interesting to see how Gross National Income has no impact on life expectancy and other common factors attributed to Economic Development, yet, "income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them."
The more inequality of income within a country, the worse the living conditions of the society (for example: Unicef index of child well-being, mental illness, high school drop out rate, etc.).
Some recommended solutions included: increasing company-employee ownership, promoting more directors from within companies, stopping tax avoidance, ending tax havens, and making tax progressive again.
Typic as l leftist view. Larger Government and more taxes is the solution to all problems. What a foolish argument
In addition to income inequality, he should look at the effect of cultural homogeneity on how well societies do. Some of the effects he attributes to income inequality may correlate equally well with cultural diversity.
MAH GAWWWDDD
Wonder if it start being disadvantagous if the equality gets too close to total equality.
Thank you for pointing me to this, it strongly supports what I already suspected.
I found a solution to the problem: "Commonwealth!" Here's an example of how: a talented entrepreneurs enjoys the challenge to create a successful business. He then sells it to his employees, who then become owners; i.e. don't depend anymore on unions and low wages.
The entrepreneur gets his money back with some extra and starts a new venture... and again selling it to his employees etc. and every time the entrepreneur gets his money back with some extra and starts an even bigger venture... Gradually, we all become self-employed business owners! If then the more greedy ones own more, the less greedy ones won't envy them. Imagine how proud an entrepreneur then could be after having turned 2000 low wage earners into well to do business owners!
So, why it is not happening? Because most (if not all) talented entrepreneurs suffer from sordid greed! They believe only their talents deserve all the materialistic riches in our world. :( Reason: They failed to dismantle their inherited/ or environmentally acquired negative traits and thus are unable to develop their full human potential!
Are they not worried that their grossly selfish behavior in the long run might ignite yet another "Kristallnacht"?
I truly believe that there is more to life than materialistic greed. Let's remember: nature's laws burden the materialistic successful with the moral obligation to help alleviate the suffering of the materialistically poor.
That's why, wouldn't it be smarter for the former to create and broaden a social safety net, which protects all citizens? - I mean, the least our wealthy capitalist society can afford is to secure the existence of every citizen! I am not asking too much, am I? It's not nobody's right to blame any individual for his materialistic misfortune. Even a drug addict is a citizen and human being, who deserves our help. The next step then should be to guide and encourage "a materialistic loser" to a better his/ her life.
To some extent it's already implemented in some modern countries, such as in Europe, Canada, USA, Australia; albeit their social security is still fairly primitive, yet it points into the right direction...
Yes, I did my share of philosophical pondering and insight originating about quality of life; even wrote a few (non-pious) books about it: The first one I titled: "A Guide To Personal Contentment", followed by a couple more, titled: "Grandpa's Insight". Goggle my name: Johannes K. Drinda
I see it rather this way: The "power of the Universe" (i.e. nature, not the God of any pious business organization) allowed or chose us humans to mange planet Earth, under the condition that we follow nature's laws. Thus, all our actions are monitored and rewarded or compensated, accordingly.
Most economist's might dismiss my insight as "unsubstantiated palaver", albeit their account figures support my reasoning.
Thus, if we mismanage and so, fail to cooperate with nature's laws our planet long enough, nature is going to give up on us and simply recycle us, for we are only an "insignificant dot" in the Universe. Therefore, we should regard ourselves as "nature's tools". The Universe doesn't need us, but we need the Universe. That's the deal. Yea, it's like with Putin's Russia: Putin now needs China, but China doesn't need Putin... :)
Yes, these are constructive and progressive trends. The problem is that many young people are taught to embrace materialism, use credit cards etc. and too busy paying their bills than to think of anything else. Capitalists aim to control the masses of philosophically confused (mostly young) people via one string and keep you entertained and bus, so, that you'll stay away from their materialistic aspirations and get it all their way.
I'm already too old to be taken seriously by most young people, because according to them any person over the age of 70 is mentally senile. Little do they know that many mentally sane elders acquired lots of invaluable wisdom.
You see, the true culprit of our socio-economic inequality is blatant, sordid greed of materialist and capitalists. They can't get their necks full enough! The more the own, the more they want and they don't care if their compatriots starve to death, yet they want your kids to join the army to defend the loot of the rich.
Only occasionally we hear of millionaires coming to their senses and decide to give away lots of their excess cash; like the generous, caring Leonardo Julio Farkas, a Chilean businessman and philanthropist, who put's Chile's sordid politicians to shame.
+Joh Drinda If everyone owned businesses we wont have employees. The structure of the world and its economics is not perfect but in most cases it is workable and part of that is based on the fact that we as humans are individuals and we think different and want to be different. It is because of this diversity of mental make-up why some people are comfortable being employees while others are comfortable being criminals and other wont settle for nothing but wealth.
The Lazlo The workers, who would become owners, are already self-motivated, qualified professionals. Thus, they will enjoy fulfilling their individual interests while sharing them in a bigger context. On their own they wouldn't be able to run (for instance) a laboratory, an auto repair business, a supermarket etc.Thus, as individual employees they would not get far.
I am almost sure that workers, who turned into business owners, would abandon their criminal ambitions. - Let's face it most criminals became criminals out of poverty; only a small percentage are mentally sick, who will eventually have to learn to "feel comfortable" in a mental asylum or jail!
Besides, I once worked with a Hungarian boss, called "Lazlo Nemesh"... who offered me a job in his jewelry wholesale. We both would have been even better off if we would have both been owners of the business.
Artificial scarcity...,
- ...is the prime factor among the majority of current existing and overall unnecessary suffering we see in Our World today caused by economic disparity...
M.D. - A.D.
Yes, completely so. Where I grew up, the richer people looked down on the poorer and the poorer were jealous and had a distain towards the more wealthy. I never understood why people just can't get along.
Economic inequality not only harms society but also create many crime scenes. According to the statistics criticism is common in rich and poor.
Most important: Money education starts at home. Don't spend more than one earns. Save to weather bad times. No credit cards. Be a minimalist. Stop consuming, but producing. You can start growing vegetables even on your table.
@@wisepersonsay3142 stfu bling out dude. conservation leads t boringness lol
True, if some things were up for discussion. I've had "discussions" who refused to acknowledge how per-capita systems work (insisting on only looking at a countries "full" number, no matter the country), or outright denying factual matters. You can't always reason with such people, nor can you expect people who are actually knowledgeable on an area to spend hours explaining basic information and principles to people.
I respect this guy for not picking sides wether or not redistribution and solalism works, and only objectively states the facts.
The key here is not income equality. "Wealth" is more then just fiat dollars per hour, and means different things to different people. OPPORTUNITY and economic ENTRY equality is what needs to be equal. Meaning anyone who WANTS to work hard to become wealthy has a chance to use whatever skills they have to do so, without monoplies, legislation, favoritism
All he did was point out the existence of inequality, but didn't explain why it's there. He assumed that every derivative society measure was caused by inequality, when it's actually caused by what's causing the inequality. Once again he's proving the danger of using correlations.
And as other comments have pointed out, using countries like Japan and Sweden is weak, given their homogenous cultures.
As for blaming crime on punitive measures. Come on, be serious.
Hi
Income and equality is a good thing. It makes you work harder!
Thanks for listening!
Nature made us this way. Life is built on the success and failures of humanity. If nature was equal, then there would be alot more human species still alive today.
I'm glad that at least a few comments point that out. What's scary is that the overwhelming majority of the audience doesn't see that. This is why it's so easy to spread trash theories.
Incarceration levels are largely a result of harsh punishments as opposed to rehabilitation.
Sweden isn’t homogeneous.
The extreme inequality we have now favors extreme monopolies, the wealthy billionaires absorb all the money from the lower classes, store it away in fiscal heavens and so the money is not reinvested. Middle class people on the other hand reinvest almost all the money and so the businnes cycle continues. So, unless you tax away the extreme inequality we have now, you wont have prosperity, this is just 1+1. You have either a middle class economy or you have a billionaires and poor people economy, you cant have both. The "free market"-mantra is just pure ideology, not factual in the real world
We believe it is a wonderful video summarizing the correlation between wealth disparity and negative social effects. We overuse the values for GDP per capita, hence seeing no correlation and ending our analysis. We found it interesting how there is such a strong relationship between income inequality, a factor not usually considered when discussing infant mortality and life expectancy.
Nobody says that there are not people who are needy or in need of other peoples help. The question though is, does the government have to do it? Before Bismarck introduced social systems to better suppress the bottom part of society, as he openly said, we had better and cheaper and fairer systems.
We should try to get back to private systems that compete with each other, with less waste, less cronyism and less corruption. 90% of the population was organized in mutual aid before gov destroyed it.
What a joke...
Esta presentación la deberían proyectar en todas las escuelas elementales y secundarias del mundo.
This is my favourite TEDtalk.
I have to say that this is what Bernie Sanders has been talking about for many years. I'm going to show this to my students!
There is more to the story. Do a RUclips search on Fred Harrison, a British economist who has written extensively on how to end poverty and misery around the world. He has also produced a series of hard-hitting short documentary films.
Sorry to bump so late but you do realise that americans can never be denmark right? You are too diverse racially and culturally. Turns out diversity is not your strenght, who would have thought
Don't show this to your students lol. You want to encourage them to work, to take risks, not to live off of welfare.
Ha! Thanks for the Fred Harrison recommendation. I will check it out.
Hey, fellow teacher here, great to hear! How did this go down with your students?
Why not work on eliminating the irrational mindset of people comparing themselves to others instead? Why let envy rule?
a little envy is healthy.
wanting others to have as bad as you is bad, wanting to have good like others and working throwards this is good... simple as that
Humans are social creatures. We're pretty much hard wired to compare ourselves and each other.
Because it's biological.
oh i just reviewed this book on my channel - its AMAZING!!!
It's crucial for economists to determine the level of inequality that does not hinder economic growth while maintaining a high level of satisfaction amongst the general populace
Does he control for poverty? Because there will be a strong correlation between the 20% R/P inequality measure and the poverty levels
A lot of these graphs wouldn't pass for a middle school project! No citations of the conducted studies, plus half of these graphs use numeric values of "Low" and "High". I appreciate the argument he's making, but to prove your point you also need to prove that your information is believable.
literally says it not even 3 minutes in where all his data is coming from...
It would have taken the speaker hours to include what TheOBXMULE suggests and I doubt he was allocated that much time by TED. Besides, this information is, I suspect, available on the internet. Google it!
You can find these studies online and validate them for yourself
He doesn't understand that correlation doesn't imply causation.
He replies to that argument in the end of the video, so maybe just watch the whole video?
Japan looks sweet to live in
You should go
A swedish study, translated:
Students with few friends and low status in the class gets poorer health as adults. If there is unequal distribution of status in the class also affected health effects in adulthood, even for students with high status, according to research from the University of Stockholm.
The students who had low status among their peers have a higher risk of being hospitalized for such mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, heart disease and diabetes.
Wilkinson=correct!
In this video, Richard Wilkinson discusses the issue of how economic inequality harms society.
We found it was very interesting that there is no correlation between gross national income and life expectancy. Countries like USA are twice as rich as countries like Israel and Portugal, yet there is no improvement in life expectancy. However, the correlation lies in income inequality in the economy. Countries with greater income inequality (ex. Portugal and USA) have a lower life expectancy than countries with little income inequality. In addition, there is a direct correlation between greater income inequality and great negative health and social problems. These problems include life expectancy, math and literacy rates, teenage pregnancy, addiction (drugs and alcohol), homicides, mental illness, and more. He shows that again, gross national income has no correlation with these health and social problems. Furthermore, Wilkinson points out that greater equality affects the top too, not just the bottom. There are better health and education benefits to both the top and bottom with equality. He then proposes solutions. For example, he states that stopping tax avoidance of the rich, having tax progression, and promoting more directors within economy will contribute towards greater equality. The main message that we think this TedTalk is showing is that quality of life in society can be greatly improved with economic equality.
Angela and Ryan
Thank you for an interesting response....does correlation necessarily mean causation?? smoking is correlated with alcoholism, but doesn’t cause alcoholism... while smoking causes an increase in the risk of developing lung cancer. So does economic equality cause quality of life improvement?
You may be interested in reading this blog...quite lengthy but very informative;
www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/
It's so sickening how many of the people on the list of billionaires inherited their parents business.
Hard work huh? I think not so much. Not when your parents die and hand over the already well run billion dollar business to you. The Koch family is a perfect example of this
Why can't we have a Democratic Company. We're workers can voice their opinions and concerns, as well as electing a CEO, and can never be inherent.
I also like to say.
We have no Individuality, but rather you inherent it.
Your parents are free to do what they please with their own money and assets. What part of that is sickening?
Pretty much so in Japan. The inheritance tax is very high as compared to other developed nations. That is another factor why Japan is keeping the gap low.
Totally agreed. Inheritance tax should be 100% over $1 million. Everyone arguing against that licks boots. Maybe one day the rich will realize their opulence would be less disgusting if they didn't threaten their employees with homelessness and destitution and death in the streets in order to force us to work harder. Maybe one day there won't be more empty homes than there are people forced to live on the streets. Maybe one day the rich will realize that taxes are just guillotine insurance. But I wouldn't count on it. I think it's much more important to get together with friends and neighbors who are just as disgusted and do something about it. Direct action, mutual aid, union organizing, and independent education are all great tactics imo.
Also, +Hector Vega look up how worker co-ops work. Spanish manufacturing giant Mondragon isn't perfect, but they're at least an example of how successful at growth co-ops can be if they focus on it. Economist Richard Wolff's organization Democracy at Work has a lot of good material on co-ops as well.
we need to replace this money system with a better system .....
a currency where the volume is defined by the people who use it and the people who use it get to decide how much its worth, as well as an anarchy so that the market is truly free and the growth of wealth isn't stunted by government influence
Look up the Venus Project (Resource Based Economy) Its really interesting.
EarthONE UPC Very Interesting project indeed
Yes, break the monopoly of government on money. People could use gold backed currency or Ƀitcoins instead of inflationary fiat money. We have to get rid of the central banks.
Currently this money printing by government is like an extra tax, robbing people.
Very important video
5:05 The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That’s very important in poorer countries but not in the rich, developed world.” But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other matter very much.
I bought the book, The Spirit Level, so intriguing. Great to see the video.
If this has taught me anything it's that I have got to get to Japan. Haha.
Did you ever go?
Well did you?
Why the speaker omitted Singapore from the various charts?
he intentionally censored data that didn't support his narrative
I wonder what euqlity they he really had in mind
Presumably because there wasn't any data for Singapore for the statistics on those charts. Different countries measure different things. Just try getting statistics on police shootings in the US, for instance.
I disagree. As he stated, only so many papers were done on this subject. So, they took all data available and put it in!
@@DC-sy5zv
You don't know anything about economics, for example, in Norway the quality of life is much better than in Singapore even when their per capita GDP are very similar (Norway is one of the most egalitarian and statist countries in the world)
Source: www.google.com/amp/s/thehearttruths.com/2014/04/30/80-of-singaporeans-are-poorer-than-a-cleaner-in-norway/amp/
Correlation does not equal causation. Sigh....
Saying that doesn't mean it's automatically wrong. Sigh...
But stating a correlation doesn't automatically mean it's right, and since he's the one making the claim the burden of proof is on him,
Theo-Retical Fair enough, i read the book in which he goes into much more detail about this issue, im not sure if he proves beyond any doubt but he does at least recognise and acknowledge this.
he mentions that at about 15:27
Yes of course not but one of the most telling labels of causation is multiple unrelated correlations leading to the same ends. How will we prove that people are more likely to commit crime or fall to the pressures of predispositioned mental illness under stress, and that stress is more severe in cases where the individual is reflective of social pressure? That would require intricate knowledge not only on the chemical reactions within the brain, but the full process of mRNA and it's interaction with personality. So we won't be seeing causality in things like this for a few years.. The best we can do is be philosophical and assume such things are true based on deductive evidence. So far that's true and therefore we should try to make changes in order to better our society.
You can go ahead and still be skeptical, but most of the intelligent community is satisfied with this kind of reasoning for now, and we can of course go on without you.
Income inequality really does throw the concept of us all being equal out the window. How are you equal to me or my neighbors if you are a millionaire. How are you equal to us if the quality of food, size of your house, quality of your possessions and quality of life is so much better than ours? How are we equal?
Worth repeating for the third time: "Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals". Observe the same stress in (other) animals.
“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.”
-Plato Greek philosopher (427-347 B.C.)
The statistics make Japan seem like a model country, but it's far from it. There's a lot of poverty and mental illness in Japan, but people just don't talk about it. There's a saying that "the nail that sticks out always gets hammered down." If you're not like everybody else you are put to shame. Japan has a high suicide rate, death from overwork, and hikikomori (social shut-ins).
Yup absolutely agree.
Bernie Sanders 2016
Feeling da bern
DA BERNS.
Da Burnt Out
Bernie Sanders, the old jewish communist that wants to implement bread lines and free collage, free health care and free everything but forgetting to tell who's going to pay for it.
*college
Sanders' supporters know exactly how it would be paid for. It's not our fault you resort to strawman arguments when you're to lazy/stupid to read about the bullshit you spread.
I think that economic inequality is the hallmark of a good society. Look at history folks, poor are meant to be poor.
Lmao. The capitalist pig in its natural habitat.
you shouldn't describe that as thinking.
there are only two ways to get rid of the poor - kill all the poor or don't allow anybody to be rich...
you sound a bit dumb Pawel, its not about getting rid of the poor, its about getting rid of poverty; material poverty for a start, that easy to achieve, spiritual poverty is a bit more complicated, cause some people just have ugly minds, no matter the size of their wallets.
Mag and Pawel, you guy's Can make more money than me, but I'll be rich on mind and in heart.
In “Occupying Chairlifts” a simple rule tweak on inheritance ends up changing the direction and purpose of modern human life! Here’s a fair way to transition forward to where we’re rewarded for cooperating and creating instead of competing and conquering.
It's something specific we can demand. If this isnt the best answer, at least we’re thinking about what might be. Are we really just this close to having it work right?
Oh yeah, it's a Ski movie! “Occupying Chairlifts” on RUclips!
We are products of our environment, broken homes, poor education, no healthcare, nutrition less food, heavy taxation, burdensome housing, false scarcity, high unemployment, concentrated wealth. It's easy when people are fearful, disorganized, feeling separate. They want us to fight amongst ourselves so we can be vulnerable to demagogues who will say it's because of government, immigrants, blacks,when in actuality we are all struggling over a smaller and smaller share of a bigger AND BIGGER pie.
I'm sorry, how exactly is Israel a poor country?
Martin D well, look at their economy. it's nothing compared to US economy.
Martin D that's why we give them billions XD
ridiculous. What news sources do you watch/read?
Blake Rees dubious choice of language...you mean the pharmaceutical business? That's a discussion for another day. Why do they have a healthy economy? Is it because they have "good business initiative", or because they've destroyed any regime that tried to build its own currency and systematically monopolised almost the entire global banking system ?
Blake Rees furthermore, how exactly are your facetious points related to economic inequality and my argument that Israel is one of the richest, not the poorest in the world?
I don't agree at all with what Richard Wilkinson said in this video. I don't know the reality of all countries that were referred on this video, but I do about Portugal. Looking just to that data presented on this video, Richard Wilkinson tells us social problems existent on Portugal are related with the inequality; looking around me, I see that problem differently. We have problems in our society not because the differences between rich and poor, but because the portuguese people doesn't know how to properly behave! The great majority of the portuguese people is intolerant, revengeful and doesn't like to behave accordingly the law! The portuguese people doesn't like to pay taxes, doesn't like to actively participate in our common problems' resolution and above anything else, when they have an opinion, they don't change it even if they are shown proves of the opposite working better. Having a more equal society in Portugal wouldn't solve a thing, once all the problems with alcohol abuse, drugs abuse, thievery and so on would remain. And how do I know it? Because I look around me at the university, for example, and I see students that come from wealthy families abusing on alcohol, abusing on drugs, misbehaving and being violent too. More family income doesn't change a thing.
People become more intolerant and cranky when they feel that, despite their best efforts, they're not getting anywhere. When you work hard, get an education and do all the right things but still can't make more than basic survival, and sometimes not even that, you get disheartened and demoralised. Multiply that situation by the millions and you get a big social problem.
Capitalism FAILED and I blame the Government for bailing out the Banks instead of helping the needy.
+Riotboy1 Unfortunate, but the government had to bail out the banks. The alternative was much worse
slightlyjamaicanman i would agree if there had been reform, but is now worse.
Trust me the world runs on this methods, where do you think you get all the necessities from? Without the first capitalists who were willing to take risky and costly projects, where are you now? Nights without bulbs, walking without cars. Do you think these technology just came out of nowhere?
Eugene Rider I'm sick of the argument of the capitalism creates technology. NO Technologies always result from understanding laws of nature and then by engineering them applying them. Capitalism is just a method in which we ensure some people get access to the resources and others do not; look at the world it's clearly indicated in the state of things.
Capitalism claims scarcity is the reason for the necessity of this economic model that historically requires growth and the destruction of the environment because it's an externality in their narrow monetary thinking.
We have the technical capacity to create a world of abundance for more than probably 10 billion while not over stressing the environment if we used a rational system that seeks to create abundance and maintain dynamic equilibrium with the environment.
The intelligent use of our resources could end poverty. And poverty is the root cause of many other problems like crime for example.
Www.thevenusproject.com
Sigh, no way you're going to end poverty.
I'd love to see you do that in the next 100 years or maybe you can use the green tech to prolong your life to 1000 years.
I was not saying Capitalism creates tech, I said, capitalsim provides methods for tech to produce. And you said it either.
And green and recyclable fuels and energy are exactly what current industry is heading to.
saw a video with interviews of people participating in it. They said it was pretty darn good while it lasted.
Nice shirt Mr Wilkinson. Fresh out of the packaging. Needs ironing. Hee hee made me chuckle.
Correlation doesn’t automatically mean causation. I’d love an actual explanation from this guy, or anyone else for that matter, on how exactly wealth inequality leads to these things. You can have wealth equality but everyone is dirt poor - you’re telling me this is beneficial? I laugh.
Economic inequality is the price you pay for capitalism
+badpanda84 Wrong. Norway and Sweden and Scandanavia have wealth distribution that isn't equal - 7 to 1, 6 to 1, 13 to 1.
But in the USA the average CEO makes 300x that of the average worker.
Ahh, so you're saying mixed economies, where socialist policies take certain things off the table so that people don't take advantage of people, and capitalist policies stimulate economic growth by competition?
+J Beezers "Norway, Sweden and scandinavia" (Norway and Sweden are parts of Scandinavia - Kingdom of Norway, Sweden and Denmark) are capitalist societies. You argument is invalid.
No Anzus, the argument is not invalid because his argument was not the Sweden and Scandinavia are not capitalist societies. He was pointing out that those countries have a mixed economy that works to keep income inequality from a minimum. You can have people that earn more earning 7 times the people that earn less, instead of 300 times.
The 0,1 richest people in Norway have above one hundred times more wealth than the general public, so no, they are far from equal. Still not too bad compared to the US
The charts are suspicious. I'm guessing this is not the whole truth.
ApBlakk On his list of economic equity of nations, he forgot Afghanistan. It is as economically equal to Afghanistan.
Psst.. this isn’t the place for thinking or logic based reasoning. It’s where people come to be shellacked in a coat of superiority made of their own inner sense of inferiority. It’s where envy is made into a moral virtue. After which, we can all sleep peacefully knowing that our lives are meaningless, that we can do nothing to improve our lives, and that anyone whose life does have meaning and whose actions have improved their life must be sacrificed - because they don’t fit nicely onto our premade color coordinated scatter plots.
The beginning of the video shows correlation, but not causation
damn the USA is last in everything...
but everyone wants to live there....strange :-)))
The poor and workers have a cap on their wages and benifits, let's bring out a cap on wealth.
What cap on the poor? Do you mean a cap set by some law? No such thing that I've ever heard of, at least not in free countries.
I feel really sad for mankind when I see videos like this one and how vast majority of people believe this. It is easy to blame factors that are out of our control when we don't feel successful, but as easy as it is, it is also dangerous. These videos indoctrinate people to feel abused by the rich, to think that some socialist political elites will somehow make everyone rich and successful without even trying, and eventually they make you vote for socialists even though the socialist economical doctrines are those that support big business and real inequality in the first place. How misguided this is!
To illustrate the cluelesness of the man speaking, just listen to him when he discusses the criticism in the end. When he gets to discus correlation v. causality, which is a MAJOR flaw of this theory, he just says that they've put a lot of thought in it and that you simply have to believe him. Not a single word of evidence. Way to go!
The best thing everyone can do for themselves is to think for themselves! Don't let others tell you, that if you've been born poor, you will die poor, unless some socialist politician makes your boss pay you twice as much. That's not how it works. We've seen these ideas crash and burn many times before. Yet somehow, modern day communists like Piketty are the best-selling authors in the field of economy.
Martin Kyslinger Very well said. It is good to know there are others who don't buy into the kind of indoctrination presented in this video.
yup, there is a difference between correlation and causality
***** Did I say anything about me knowing that? The problem is that I don't know that and where he is supposed to give proof, he requests trust. He himself said that his theory has been criticised for this issue and what does he say upon this criticism? That they spent a lot of time thinking about it and they know it now so you have to believe them. Proving causality requires some data work and obviously I don't have the data nor am I willing to put that much time into it but that does not mean that I have to believe everything that might sound good at first glance. You might come up with various theories that explain the same thing and that's all they are. Just theories without data support (and yes, data can also be fixed sou you should always be cautious when receiving information anyway).
But in nowadays world it is not that important whether your arguments are logically sound. There is a tremendous amount of people who just want to hear that free market economy is a culture of greedy pigs. That the system is somehow stacked against the poor and therefore it's not their fault they're poor. And there's lots of people who would be happy to just have the successful ones crippled somehow so the gap is not that big.
Most political parties in Europe and the US are aware of this and they never hesitate to use it for their own gains. Just look around the world. Western world is starting to limp behind because there's so many people who lost their trust in themselves and put all the hope in some politician who promised to take care of them. Sadly, it is a naive thing to do.
And so we now live in the world where China is becoming the worlds largest economy, Europe took a bite too large for them when they tried to make Ukraine to lean towards west, the US is at the threshold of yet another huge crisis, even though CNN is telling you just the opposite.
I live in a country where under the influence of Soviet Union we were trying to make everyone equal. I can tell you that this pretended equality only caused a total breakdown of ethics because you know, there always are groups that are more equal. Now after 25 years the society still isn't healed. Yet we are facing these new communists who promise to bring equality that solves everything.
Have a nice day!
This video is indoctrinate people? lol, Ok, lets apply the indoctrinating factor. People born and raised in a culture all their lives, 20, 30, 50 years, whatever, that culture tells them X is good.. Something comes along and questions X’s validity, the natural response is to what? Listen with an open mind or attack because it is not the norm? History shows it to be the latter. I find it odd and sad how people can pull anything out from what they see. Nothing in this vid attacks the rich. It is simply pointing out the differences between societies and the byproducts of those differences based on evidence. The guy says even rich people do better in equality societies. How can that possibly be looked at blaming the rich? As far as voting, when information like this starts showing up on main stream news day after day, year after year, the same way other topics are like war, gay marriage and immigrants maybe I will give your socialist plot a second look. Until then, please stop. What I got from this is we should look at the society, what it produces, is it positive or negative and what can be done to change it. Think for yourselves you say? That is a bit vague. Thinking requires information. Not just information that makes you feel safe and comfortable. Of all sorts. Then you must evaluate it objectively. Follow the sources and over time arrive and a conclusion. Not based on what you want it to be, but what it actual is. Anyone thinking for themselves and not taking the steps to make sure what they are thinking is true can and will go around in circles, confirmation bias and all. My goodness man, you people are the problem that don’t like seeing evidence that clashes with your establish world view. If you don’t like it, by all means please provide counter studies with mounting evidence to prove otherwise instead of accusations, conjecture, assumptions and assertions without evidence. That is how real progress is made. Good luck.
moety2 Okay, we are in an internet discussion and for every answer you want an in-depth study? Eh, sure...
Now to the points you make (by the way neither you do provide "studies with mounting evidence"):
1. You are right that people "attack because it is not the norm" many ideas. But this inequality rant seems to be the norm if you look for example at the like/dislike counter under this video. So when i disagree with it, I believe that I do violate this "norm" and therefore I can expect stuff thrown at me and I'm okay with that but you should be more careful about your points because to me, they seem to be aimed against you.
2. "Nothing in this vid attacks the rich." Again, you are right. He does not say we should kill the rich and steal their endownments. But you can't dispute that he presents inequality as a problem for whatever reason. Now when you have identified the problem, what remains is to come up with a solution. You can do it either by making the poor richer or by making the rich poorer or both. And which solution is proposed more commonly? Higher taxation of the rich or using whips on the poor to make them work harder so they are worth more money? The problem is that if you implement extremely high taxation of the rich (like France for example who steals about three quarters of some people's income), they work less or stop working at all (or move their business elsewhere which, for a given country, is the same as if they stopped making money). The tax revenue therefore does not rise at best and nobody is made better off because you don't collect more taxes to provide for the poor. So the net result is that the rich have less, poor are still poor, and sure, the gap is smaller or in other words there is less inequality.
Other very common proposal to shrink the rich-poor gap is to raise the minimum wage. The problem here is that if you make McDonalds pay their workers 15 dollars per hour, they will have to either raise prices and therefore shut some restaurants and fire people or automatize (develop or buy machines to replace workers) and fire some of the people as well. Some are made better off because they get a raise but society as a whole is made worse off because part of the people is fired and the raises are offset by higher prices.
3. "Thinking requires information. Not just information that makes you feel safe and comfortable." You are right for the third time. I am afraid, however, that you are the one who flows with the mainstream opinion and accuses others who dare to oppose it to be the problem because they don't like these correlation "proofs" of the opinions you happen to agree with.
You are also deeply mistaken if you believe that "real progress" will be made if some people in public universities (preferably dealing with social studies or Keynesian economy, right?) will come up with a solution to inequality.
People are born unequal both in terms of surroundings and abilities. I myself come from very humble surroundings (bottom 10 % in an Eastern-European country) but I'd rather chose to employ my abilities to get a better life for me than to hope for some social experiment with aim to reduce inequality to save me. You can choose otherwise and I wish good luck to you too.
i wish he included more countries in those examples
He talks a lot about not picking and choosing data, but Singapore only seem to appear on the graphs that prove his point. I'm sure Singapore does well on many social indicators despite the income inequality.
A thousand people with a million dollars to invest in the economy is far better than one person with a billion dollars to invest because the billionaire will hedge his risk by investing 500 million and hoard the rest
In developed economy, investing in shares and securities give tax economization. Loss on share trading offsets one's income. The system itself is fraudulant.