Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

http://www.ted.com We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.

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[dchangebegins]

Development at the cost of such issues is not a development

[unvergebeneid]

The idea of a social market economy is to counteract the natural progression of capitalism. How do you explain the differences between all these countries? They are all capitalist countries.

This was a 15-minute peek into a huge body of research. If you found it too brief, why don't you read up?

[IntuitiveLeap]

why would you assume that paying a tax necessarily lowers your standard of living? seems mighty short sighted to me (not that i love taxes). did you want to pay hundreds(thousands millions trillions w/e it is) of times as much to design build and maintain the roads you need for your life's pursuits? do the same for your comm infrastructures? you sound like ur coming from a specific ideology's P.O.V., not a fact based one.

[James Bowyer]

Missed here is the economic development sustained from the lowered standards in society. For example, by paying taxs, on a basic level, you are decreasing your lifes standards, and again, on a basic level, exchanging money for protection ( military), economic sustainability, for losing some life standards. Thus income inequality is not harming society - it is harming the life standards, which is dependent on tax, and more tax means bettering in other locations. Also, note religious correlation.

[allgoo19]

"Banks and investors just take advantage of the situation created by government"

==

You mean they aren't paying money to get their ways, to make it easier for them to take advantage of?

You don't know who are the biggest contributors to the political campaign?

[gnawershreth]

.. And I never said it did. Where are you getting this stuff?

Having to pay for your own education (Instead of having taxes pay..) doesn't make an education better though. The universities etc. still get paid.. The only thing that changes is where the money comes from.

[jdiwkall]

well it's kind of hard to do that when billionaires and their buddies also run for political office or install their millionaire buddies into gov't now ain't it?

[vie829]

Just bcoz everyone has equal access to education doesn't mean that they have the same quality of education. The quality of the opportunity given takes more presidency over the quantity of opportunity given. Read Marxist views on different educational attainment.

[ab0032]

"Don't you have a brain?" How polite.

Banks and investors just take advantage of the situation created by government, that is natural and normal. The root of the cause is that the government creates the opportunity for them to take advantage of this. You can't blame them for wanting to earn money. If the government would not fiddle and intervene and distort the market and let a free market work things out, there would be no chance that the banks or investors to do anything that could harm others

[jdiwkall]

you blame the gov't but is the gov't all there is to blame? why can't you blame goldman sachs, lehman brothers, and all the other thousands of banks and individual investors who went on the mortgage backed securities gravy train? Why?!?!?! That's what I don't understand...if you only blame the gov't and the gov't is not the only problem, then you aren't blaming the right problem and you end up fixing nothing. Don't you have a brain?

[gnawershreth]

That shouldn't really surprise people though. If you're from a "poor" family in the US, getting an education can be challenging, since it's so damn expensive.

Using Denmark as the example, it doesn't matter. Education is there for anyone interested. Having a rich family doesn't make that much of a difference really, since the education is paid for by tax money.

It seems obvious that "free" education is going to increase the level of mobility in a country, I would think..

[iluan Hernandez]

Not at all. That list is only taking in consideration rich market democracies. Singapore has 9.7, but on the same income inequality index Mexico has 12.8, Argentina has 17.8, Colombia has 25.3, Bolivia has 42.3, and Sierra Leone has freaking 57.6 ! The data are on the Human Development report (UN, 2008). It would be interesting to do the same analysis on those nations , don't you think?