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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  People & Blogs

[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?

[owenallford]

I wonder how all these factors compare with the price of beer?

[t3mpl3guardian]

with over a billion people, getting relevant data on the lower classes would likely be near impossible.

[Daniel Brandão]

Probably the same reason why (among others) their economy is stagnated since 90s: their happiness do not depends on getting rich.

[Souji Seta]

Restriction of information from the Government?  That is probably most likely.

[rustyscrapper]

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

[touvang7]

Why isnt China in the graphs?

[touvang7]

so why does japan have low income inequality? did they just choose to have it like that?