The Inequality Speech That TED Won't Show You

http://roundtable.nationaljournal.com/2012/05/the-inequality-speech-that-ted-wont-show-you.php

by JonnieCache • 14 years ago

176 103 14 years ago

roundtable.nationaljournal.com

lukev• 14 years ago

Too controversial? Really? This is a pretty mainstream point of view, although perhaps not the one in political ascendancy at the moment. Hardly the stuff of censorship.

I strongly suspect there was some other reason it wasn't posted.

rubymaverick• 14 years ago

My suspicion is that it just wasn't that good. This was given at a TEDx event, not an official TED conference, which means they have no control over the content and are pretty free to not post it. Only a few of the TEDx talks ever make it on the TED.com website.

And you are right, this is hardly controversial. You couldn't find a politician who would disagree that a strong middle-class is the backbone of our society.

Cyranix• 14 years ago

The sound bite that stuck out most to me was

    For instance, it is a small step from "job creator" to "The Creator".
    We did not accidentally choose this language.

Weird leaps of logic and data that don't directly support an argument regarding job creation are sufficient reason not to feature this talk (in addition to the partisan rhetoric which is verboten for TED).

nodata• 14 years ago

Apparently it's too partisan: "This idea is an article of faith for republicans _and seldom challenged by democrats_ and has shaped much of today's economic landscape."

_delirium2• 14 years ago

It does sound like it was at least a vaguely political decision, mixed with image-maintenance PR concerns, if the email excerpts from the related article (http://nationaljournal.com/features/restoration-calls/too-ho...) are genuine.

Fwiw, TED doesn't publish all talks, especially not all TEDx talks, so it's not as if this was singled out to be suppressed. But it sounds like it wasn't selected for publication due to a mixture of: 1) Anderson personally disagreeing with its politics; and 2) TED's attempt to carefully manage its image on anything political, which involves closely planned and timed releases of things like the two "political" videos they did publish, on global-warming and contraception.

The main PR mistake TED made, afaict, was to say enough to give an impression that it was political. If it just got lost in the shuffle, like most TEDx talks do (few are posted on ted.com), it'd be one thing, but Anderson arguing against points in the talk, and then giving the impression that it was scheduled and later pulled due to partisanship concerns, created a fiasco where one wouldn't have existed.

saraid216• 14 years ago

Well, according to the article, Anderson didn't personally disagree with its politics. That's what makes it interesting to me.

> "Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

I dunno.

The New York Times regularly posts hand-wringing debates between "the usual suspects" on this issues.

Everybody in these debates seems to take it for granted that taxing the rich will hurt economic growth, but maybe just maybe there are some benefits to equality that will make up for that.

Nobody mentions that an economy has a hypothetical failure mode (like the game of Monopoly) where all of the money ends up in one person's hands -- and then trading stops.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Nobody mentions that an economy has a hypothetical failure mode (like the game of Monopoly) where all of the money ends up in one person's hands -- and then trading stops.

Huh? I'm having a really hard time imagining how this could possibly happen. Does that person not ever need to buy anything? If they don't buy things they're taking that money out of circulation, and if you have a central bank targeting anything (or free banking, or most banking systems humans have tried) the people who can make more money will make more money in order to hit their targets. I'm pretty sure that nobody mentions that because the idea is, well, pretty ridiculous.

jonallanharper• 14 years ago

"Nobody mentions that an economy has a hypothetical failure mode (like the game of Monopoly) where all of the money ends up in one person's hands -- and then trading stops."

Stunning level of ignorance.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

If one person has all the money, wouldn't the government just got an (literally) print more money?

The pre-existing money would be massively devalued, sure, but it's only one guy affected so who would care?

nilsbunger3• 14 years ago

It probably isn't the content, but the one-sidedness. Tying loss of the middle class to tax policy is a political statement, and probably not even correct - or at least he didn't give much evidence for it.

I happen to agree taxes on the rich should go up, but that's not the point

btilly5• 14 years ago

He pointed out how falling taxes on the rich correlated with a decline of the middle class. But that could just be coincidence.

I could point out that the largest expansion of the US middle class on record happened during the 1950s when the top personal income tax rate was over 90%. But that could just be coincidence as well.

I can point out that economic theory says that the economic impact of giving a person a dollar is directly connected to their likelihood of spending it. Since the rich are less likely to spend than the middle class and the poor, taxing them hurts the economy less than taxing anyone else. But once you descend into economic theory, everyone has a theory and an argument and you get a morass that normal people can't make heads or tails of.

I could point out that the Republican ideology that less taxes on the rich is always good has exactly no evidence supporting it. That's a very thin amount of evidence for the huge social experiment that we're currently running in this country. But once you descend into politics everyone already has their minds made up, so that's a lost cause.

All of which begs the real question; if the proposition is true, what evidence would suffice to actually convince people of it who are not already convinced?

cullen• 14 years ago

Sigh... This thread, again?

_delirium2• 14 years ago

I had missed the previous one; for anyone else likewise having done so, here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3983598

Duff2• 14 years ago

I've seen a few mentions about this fairly inane speech -- smells like PR/astroturfing to me.

Frankly, whenever I hear the phrase "job creation" I tune out immediately, because I know that nothing intelligent will follow that phrase ever.

People hire people to do things when they have work to do. You "create jobs" by increasing economic activity. The problem is, business these days is all about consolidation and labor arbitrage.

nooop2• 14 years ago

You can't just declare a speech insane without a good reason, especially if it more or less agrees with what you state just next...

Edit: although i don't know how to read (insane vs. inane), this does not fundamentally changes anything in context...

bitdiffusion• 14 years ago

inane != insane

dsrguru• 14 years ago

Duff said inane, not insane.

mjwalshe2• 14 years ago

Buy a dictionary :-)

Duff2• 14 years ago

The tone of the article implies that TED is somehow suppressing the dissemination of this speech because it's content is somehow too controversial to handle.

I declare it inane because the speech described by the article isn't very controversial at all.

Revisor• 14 years ago

Sir, you have hit the nail on the head.

It was the work of the disgruntled speaker whose talk was refused in a normal editorial process and who proceeded to hire a PR firm to create this ruckus.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3988515

Irishsteve• 14 years ago

Not particularly interesting. Just someones opinion, the masses won't push for any major change around any possible wealth divide (if it exists or not). No one goes for extremes

jsmcgd2• 14 years ago

>That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small.

This argument only considers half of the problem. Yes consumers are needed to create jobs but what is needed to create consumers? Jobs. You can't be a consumer without an income, and for the vast majority of people, you don't have an income unless you have a job.

Therefore for failing to acknowledge this fundamental, very simple and might I say, quite obvious fact, I think it's fair to say Nick Hanauer's reasoning is at best weak, and at worst disingenuous.

It makes one wonder what his motivations really are. Attention seeking contrariness? A desire to ingratiate himself with the 99%?

nooop2• 14 years ago

Yet you just made no argument for why his arguments are weak, while yours are: jobs create consumers and consumers create jobs, but in your equation absurdly rich people and increasing inequality does not seem to be needed...

jsmcgd2• 14 years ago

My very first sentence explains why I think his argument is weak.

I agree, I have stated no position on the absurdly rich and increasing inequality. I think it is unnecessary to stray into this area in order to prove or disprove whether businesses or the wealthy create jobs. Either a business or a wealthy person can or cannot create a job regardless of the taxation laws du jour. He has categorically stated that they cannot. I think this is totally incorrect.

jusben1369• 14 years ago

Maybe a more logical extension of where you could go with "only considering half the problem" is that the wealthy often put up the initial capital to create the enterprise that then sells to consumers. Salary earners tend to have a harder time creating enough spare capital to execute against an opportunity even if they see it.

leot4• 14 years ago

The wealthy will only bother to put up capital if they're more interested in earning money than in holding on to it.

Your willingness to tolerate risking x% of your wealth goes down as you get wealthier.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Ok, let's get back to the basics, because everybody looks like they lost it when they start discussing this

"rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small."

Ok, where to start

You can have "a job" essentially in two ways:

- Being self-employed (doctor, lawyer, etc), or create your own company. This is usually the minority of people

- Having a job at a company

So, yes, companies create jobs, next

Big companies create more jobs (per 'unit'). Smaller companies create less jobs (per 'unit') but combined they make more jobs in total.

Companies create an opening because of: increased production (or more customers, in case of services), new line of business. This is ignoring regular turnaround where someone quits to go somewhere else and someone is hired to replace.

Hence, new jobs comes from: - New products / services

- More people consuming existing products

(we could add loss of efficiency as well)

Now, bigger companies have a much easier time hiring new people. HR is set and knows the drill, they usually can accomodate new people with their existing profits (maybe not a lot, still)

Smaller companies have a much harder time hiring another people. Suppose you are a one man company, and you want to hire someone. You have to be HR (this cuts into your time). You may be not sure if adding this person is going to increase the profits enough to cover for the extra costs, etc

So when you cut taxes to all companies, sure, you're helping the big guys, but also the small guys.

The rich have an easier time dodging regulation or sending their profits to Ireland and back, but not the small guy

"And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class" (from the article)

Yadda yadda yadda. You want to grow the middle class? Reduce taxing on them!

But the government won't do it, because the middle class (still) has the most money available (amount of people x taxes payed by each one) and the least resources to avoid them.

bballdeo• 14 years ago

yesterday's comment thread on reddit pretty much covered this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/tqi15/too_hot_for_...

basically, this talk is mostly partisan and not supported by a lot of data. this TEDtalk, on the other hand, is:

http://blog.ted.com/2011/10/24/how-economic-inequality-harms...

timtadh• 14 years ago

From the reddit thread (which I just read through) a TED organiser responds http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/tqi15/too_hot_for_...

"TEDChris 21 points 9 hours ago

Chiming in here, as TED's Curator..

First of all, thanks for all the attention. Glad you guys care.

We do too. Income inequality is a huge issue. Most of us here at TED are pretty passionate about it.

The trouble with this talk is that it tackled the issue in a way that was explicitly partisan, framing it as a critique of "an article of faith" for Republicans. TED is avowedly non-partisan. We want to share ideas in a way that brings people together, doesn't throw sand in their faces.

We release one talk a day on our home page, and that talk is pretty much guaranteed 50,000-100,000 views within 24 hours. Every day there are numerous amazing talks competing for that slot. We have to make the best call we can. Talks that aren't selected aren't being censored, any more than the NYT (or Reddit) is censoring a story it decides isn't appropriate for its home page.

The text from this particular talk is already out there. You can make your own judgement.

Thanks, and let the discussion continue. We're listening. "

davidhollander2• 14 years ago

False dilemma fallacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

You can't attribute the existence of "jobs" exclusively to "businesses" or exclusively to "consumers", because "trade" definitionally requires the existence of two parties.

TDL• 14 years ago

Thank you. It always irritates me when complex (or at least somewhat complex) issues are boiled down to simplistic notions.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

Yet taxes on the rich are indeed cut in real life via this exact rationale.

powrtoch• 14 years ago

I don't think this is the issue addressed in the talk though. The question he was responding to was "does having lower taxes on the rich create jobs?". He argues that it does not, but that lowering taxes on the lower and middle class probably would.

It's not about putting all the blame on one side or the other, it's about the factual question of whether a particular policy improves or worsens the job situation.

davidhollander2• 14 years ago

He argues that position by repeatedly making the assertion that consumers create jobs and businesses do not:

> only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring.

>the true job creators are consumers

It's a tad nonsensical, all economic exchanges definitionally require the existence of two parties to occur, both parties are essential regardless of the good or service being traded. One can easily take the opposite position to the speaker, that production precedes consumption, because in the state of nature man must first produce and labor for his or her own survival before surplus exists with which to trade. Either way, it's not a sufficient basis for asserting normative proposals in regards to tax policy.

thwest• 14 years ago

Is this comment intended to be a critique of the speech, or in concurrence with the speech?

hnal943• 14 years ago

This of course true. Except in our economy, isn't the onus on the businesses to attract customers? I would say that therefore businesses are more responsible for job creation (because they are the ones creating value) than consumers who are merely determining which businesses have the best offerings.

The only thing I can see not working this way would be an extreme version of kickstarter, where consumers would put out a bounty for a specific product or service and have businesses form to provide it. At that point, they would be more actively "creating jobs."

einhverfr• 14 years ago

I won't nitpick the astronomy bits, but I would like to add something historical to the discussion.

In "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples," Herwig Wolfram asks the question of why the Eastern Roman Empire outlasted the Western Roman Empire by so long. The answer he comes up with is that the Western Empire had much greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the senatorial class. This meant that it was hard to collect taxes to pay for things like an army, and at the time of the invasions of the Goths and Franks, the Eastern Empire was collecting three times in taxes what the Western Empire was collecting, and thus spending more on their army than the Western Empire was collecting in taxes.

Without sufficient tax revenues he military machine could not sustain itself, and when three senatorial households had a budgets that combined equalled the entire tax revenue of the Western Empire these super-wealthy were just too politically powerful to tax. Wolfram also suggests that this is what doomed Ostrogothic Italy when they fought the Byzantines.

nilsbunger3• 14 years ago

The shrinking of the middle class is something we should all be concerned about.

But it isn't caused by tax policy: outsourcing and automation of traditional "middle class" jobs are a much bigger force.

We really need to figure out what the middle-class jobs of the future look like. What is above menial service job like retail, and below specialized trades like software?

Even people with college degrees struggle to get into the middle class these days. That should scare us all.

I have no answers to this, but I'm pretty sure tax policy isn't going to fix it, nor would protectionism.

danielweber7• 14 years ago

Economists know a lot about how to create wealth. They know very little about creating jobs.

Jobs are temporary inefficiencies and a lot of economic growth comes when you get rid of them. We've automated most of our farming, but we don't have 90% unemployment because all the farm jobs went away.

One thing is how fast technology grows related to how fast workers can adapt. 'Race Against The Machine' is a thesis that technology is now growing so fast workers can't keep up. I don't know if I buy it, but it's something to keep in mind.

andrewla• 14 years ago

I don't know if your statement about economists is intending to be a factual statement of economists' view of the state of economic science, or your opinion on what modern economic theories are good at. It's not clear to me personally, to be frank, that economics know a lot about how to create wealth either.

That said, this is not an acknowledged weakness -- Keynes' magnum opus was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which spells out in great detail how these things are related. The core of this theory is still widely held in economic circles, which is why the mandate of the Federal Reserve keeps shifting from "controlling inflation" to "maximizing employment" -- because this is thought to be something that is controllable through manipulation of interest and money.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

The shrinking of the middle class is something we should all be concerned about.

What's the evidence that the middle class has really shrunk? There's certainly evidence that the very highest incomes have climbed substantially since, say, 1980, but can you find numbers that suggest that there are fewer households making at least middle class incomes? Here's a good bit from a guy at Brookings earlier this year:

http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/288306/guest-post-scott...

Krueger’s claim of a shrinking middle class relies on the same peculiar definition. Specifically, “middle class” is defined as having a household income at least half of median income but no more than 1.5 times the median. I re-ran the numbers using the same definition and data source as Krueger and found that the entire reason the middle class has “shrunk” is that more households today have incomes that put them above middle class. That’s right, the share of households with income that puts them in the middle class or higher was 76 percent in 1970 and 75 percent in 2010—two figures that are statistically indistinguishable.

neuro• 14 years ago

Americans tax payers are a trampoline for globalizing these corporations through subsidizing their R&D, bailing them out and soldiering their resources abroad. These corporations have global consumers now, the health of the American consumer isn’t a priority.

grandalf2• 14 years ago

The problem with this argument is that job creation most definitely should not be the goal of any policy.

To illustrate how silly it is to make job creation the goal, let me share with you a very simple policy that would eliminate unemployment: Outlaw grain combines.

Without grain combines, hundreds of thousands of workers would be needed to pick things like wheat, corn, etc.

If you look at economic issues with the idea that employment is a goal, then you are bound to arrive at policies that move in the direction of this absurd idea.

Job creation != economic growth.

leot4• 14 years ago

How about the creation of good jobs?

danielweber7• 14 years ago

That's probably worse. A worker whose labor is worth $10 an hour is not going to benefit from a bunch of jobs that are priced at $40 an hour.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

That would be disaster.

Good jobs are essentially highly paid office jobs with good benefits -- and the easiest way to create more of those is to outlaw the computer, which would mean that thousands of workers would be needed to do reports for companies, the federal government, etc.

But it would also destroy a great source of real wealth.

eli_gottlieb2• 14 years ago

But if we're not going to focus on job creation, then we need to out-and-out admit that the natural rate of unemployment has gone up and we need to supply for the unemployed.

sathishmanohar• 14 years ago

If less taxes for rich should create more jobs, then, why is there more unemployment than ever, while we have lesser tax for rich than ever?

I can't understand what is wrong with this question? Its based of real world data, right?

danielweber7• 14 years ago

The short answer is that "making jobs" is a complete mystery to most economists. Aside from the government directly hiring people to bury jars full of money, no one knows how to make it happen.

It doesn't stop politicians of all stripes from pretending that they have the magic answer, and that the politicians from the other party are a bunch of nincompoops.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

From Chris Anderson's justification for not publishing it:

> But even if the talk was rated a home run, we couldn't release it, because it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political. We're in the middle of an election year in the US. Your argument comes down firmly on the side of one party.

So now it's unfairly partisan to point out that the evidence supports one party's position but not the other's? Really?

What on earth is the point of taking an evidence-based approach to public policy issues, if not to draw conclusions about which public policies we should support?

OzzyB• 14 years ago

This is what saddens me the most. We are no longer able to have any real discusion about anything anymore because pretty much everything can be stuffed into a "partisan" pigeonhole.

   -- Shrinking Middle Class == Partisan
   -- Failing Healthcare System == Partisan
   -- War on Women's Rights == Partisan

Now, on the face of it, sure, any of these topics can be construed as "partisan", but I had hoped, especially with outfits like TED, that we could get beyond that and focus on the "grey areas", the "parts in the middle", and try to have an honest intellectual debate.

But we're not allowed that anymore, even Intellectualism is partisan now since it's "so Elitist".

Welcome to the era of Politically Correct Stagnant Decline.

shantanubala2• 14 years ago

There's also something to be said about the novelty of the information that is presented.

TED is about exciting ideas (or at least, that's what I understand them to be).

From the talk: "In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich."

That is his "exciting idea" -- something that pretty much anyone who is interested in tax reform has heard before. There was nothing groundbreaking about it, no new information, and certainly no unique solution to the problem. It was literally a reiteration of political talking points that have existed for a very long time, which to be frank, is not very interesting. I even remember Mark Cuban blogging about this very same topic a few months ago, and this is an idea that isn't particularly unique.

Still, since he was invited to speak, I think his video should be part of TED's web site, but saying that he was bringing any new discussion to the table is quite generous.

Instead of implying that its motivations were political, TED could have simply said this: "The talk was interesting, but we had other talks we wanted to feature first." Boom. Done. No PR headaches.

I think this is a more generous summary of Anderson's intentions from the article: "Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media."

The talk didn't present anything new, so it doesn't need to be featured.

eli_gottlieb2• 14 years ago

Those problems aren't "partisan topics" just because one party adamantly wants to make them worse!

jberryman• 14 years ago

> So now it's unfairly partisan to point out that the evidence supports one party's position but not the other's?

I come down way on the side of Hanauer in this debate, and agree with your point above, in general. But my reading of the speech was that it was a partisan fluff piece.

If you asked any number of my liberal college-educated friends to vamp for three minutes on the subject of "the wealthy as job-creators and drivers of economic growth" and then gave it a quick edit you'd get something comparable. The only difference being Hanauer makes a fallacious argument from authority (although I think his opinion is correct).

shantanubala2• 14 years ago

But isn't that exactly why TED didn't feature the talk? TED only wants its best talks on the web site, because the web site is its way of broadcasting interesting ideas (I know many teachers and professors that regularly share TED talks with students!). I understand their desire for a really well-curated collection of videos.

Considering some of the TED talks I've seen in the past, Hanauer's talk doesn't make the cut. I could've just as easily gone to MSNBC and heard the same thing -- although I agree with his opinion, his idea is neither unique nor substantiated by unique data.

jimmar• 14 years ago

I think I have a stricter definition of evidence. I saw a lot of arguments (many that I agree with generally), but not anything I would call evidence. If he wants to prove what he is saying is true, show the empirical evidence. A lot of people argue their opinion, which is fine, but in the end it is just opinion.

pbreit• 14 years ago

This is a really bizarre move by TED. If they don't release all their videos because they just don't have the capacity or whatever, fine. But to not release a video because it sort of supports one side of the political spectrum is completely absurd. I thought TED was _supposed_ to be provocative?

Shame on Chris Anderson for the poor handling of this.

greggman• 14 years ago

The talk is interesting but the suggested solution at the end, more taxes on the rich, is highly political and no evidence what-so-ever is offered in the talk that that's the correct solution for fixing the stated inequality problem.

NHQ• 14 years ago

The claim of partisanship is an outright falsehood. The partisanship is in Chris Anderson's reason for not distributing the talk, not the talk itself. He is making it partisan, by cowing to that which we call partisanship, a thing he must surely take for granted. Maybe he is evil, too.

There is nothing partisan about it. The 1% are not a party, any more than a single senator is a party. The ability of the Corporate Rich to spin the public argument, and make it seem like there is a split conflict, that is the root of what we "end-users" perceive as partisanship. In this case, they have spun & won. The public discussion about this talk is partisanship, not the issue itself.

And Hanauer points this out. The spin of the conversation is influencing the outcome of policy. This is not new under the sun, but it is an idea worth spreading.

marknutter• 14 years ago

Well, for those who agree with the talk's sentiment, it having not made the cut is probably the best thing that could have happened to it. Now it will reach way more people under the false assumption that it was "censored".

seanp2k2• 14 years ago

Gee, you mean to say that what we've been doing is the wrong thing? Funny, because all the rich greedy people seem to be loving it.

Greed will be the downfall of western civilization. This message will not reach those with the power to fix it. It's their death, they know it, and they're just in a race to bleed the USA out and run. Or maybe I'm giving rich people too much credit and they're really just greedy idiots who don't see the consequences of their actions. In any case, we're screwed.

azylman• 14 years ago

This is the most important part of the talk:

"I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated."

This is what some people fail to understand and it boggles my mind.

anigbrowl2• 14 years ago

To which the standard debate-derailing answer is 'raise taxes, and nobody will be able to buy private goods, therefore more taxes are bad.' A great many tax objectors have convinced themselves that they are already groaning under a massive tax burden.

I agree with them in one respect: there are too many taxes, fees, levies etc. People overestimate the amount of tax tax they pay in many cases, but they see so many government charges (whether federal, state or local) that they feel they're being nickel-and-dimed to death.

marshray• 14 years ago

What does it even mean to say "creating jobs"?

A 'job' is something that you 'do', in this context, for a wage. So to "create a job" is to cause a need for something to be done, e.g. breaking a window "creates a job".

So we don't want to "create jobs"!

There are certainly lots of people right now who are looking for gainful employment. Let's reframe the problem in terms of figuring out how to get them doing stuff that actually needs doing. I think that means creating things of lasting value, not just throwing money around to stimulate ourselves.

dudeguy9992• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that the rich pay a much greater share of income tax than when their rates were higher. Can someone check me on this?

jtbigwoo• 14 years ago

Technically that's correct, but it's a red herring. The top 1% currently take a little over 20% of the total income in the country and pay about 40% of federal income taxes. From the end of WW II to the 1980's, the top 1% took between about 8% and 12% of the total income in the country and their share of the tax burden was lower. The federal tax base was also much wider since there were far fewer tax credits available to average people and there weren't any common refundable tax credits.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

"So here's an idea worth spreading.

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich."

Not saying I disagree, but I remember a few years ago when the economy was booming all over the world, there was this discussion about how bad "consumerism" is for our societies.

So which is it then? Is consumerism a bad thing because it makes us buy all sorts of dumb things, or is it good because it enriches everyone? Or is there another alternative?

Travis• 14 years ago

I think it's a bit nuanced. Consumerism, from an economic perspective, can be a fast, efficient driver of economic growth. However, it often isn't sustainable growth (not just ecologically -- the American "Manifest Destiny" growth wasn't sustainable because explorers hit the Pacific and ran out of land).

In addition to the lack of sustainability (adding back in the ecological issues), consumerism seems to drive a general cultural malaise wherein the people try to find meaning by buying crap, rather than living fulfilling lives.

IMO, consumerism is detrimental in the long run to people's mental health and the environment (and it's not sustainable); however, it has been shown to be a solid driver of economic growth.

grampajoe• 14 years ago

TED can't show this because they're supported by advertisers, which means they'll never really be free to spread ideas if they go against the will of these companies: http://conferences.ted.com/TED2012/sponsors.php

penetrator• 14 years ago

time for an OpenTED

febeling• 14 years ago

Chris Anderson just tweeted this link to a blog post explaining the story from his side. The taped talk is linked from there. http://bit.ly/KU2Rmu

The Inequality Speech That TED Won't Show You

Related Stories