How economic inequality harms societies | Richard Wilkinson

Economy | Information | History | Online | Facts | World | Global | Money

1. Engineer here with a heavy statistical background in data analysis.
   
   If income inequality is positively correlated all that means is that the data is not normally distributed and that the average is a terrible measure of it. For example, say there are 100 people and 20 are making 100,000/year, but 80 are making 10,000/year. Your average is 28,000. But most of your people are only earning 10,000/year. All his presentation tells us is what we already know: the poorer you are the lower your quality of life.
   
   I'd like to see all his graphs against the median income for each country. That would provide much more useful information. But even that would be skewed since $100,000 in LA buys you a lot less than $100,000 in Ohio.
   
   Data can always, always be manipulated to fit your story. After working in a research lab for years doing data analysis I don't trust it at all.
2. 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
3. how about a simple and paradoxical answer? define a square area, and spread some tree seeds throughout and measure the growth rates (prosperity), the population distribution curve will look identical.
4. what death penalty has to do with any of this?
5. I'm sorry, how exactly is Israel a poor country?
6. What?? "extraordinary close correlation"? not even close...They draw a line through a scatter plot with a slight trend. These is would be an embarrassing joke in a high school statistics course. This is not even a semblance of an acceptable statistical analysis. The correlation coefficient with those lines would be laughable, not to mention, no measures of error bars. I'm a scientist with a PhD in biophysics and this would not hold up in peer review of hard science.
7. Income inequality is stupid...who cares if someone has more money then you...there is huge difference between my income and that of Hollywood elites or CEOs' of major companies like Apple and Microsoft...does that mean there is injustice? No of course not becuase I'm not living in poverty...what we should be trying to solve is poverty...not stealing or "redistributing" wealth
8. I've seen better graphes at school
9. we need to replace this money system with a better system .....
10. Belgium is in a rather good position in those various graphics, looks like old data :-D, not sure about that, our social security system is at stake, income differences are becoming bigger and bigger
11. Socialists are slavers, and communists become murderers.
12. I appreciate confirmation on the reality of inhumanity which I have suspected to be true in my 75 years of my life experience . What is needed & required is a remedy ? A few natural tsunami's possibly ? Or an International humanitarian rebellion against this New World Order Elite ?
13. Why not work on eliminating the irrational mindset of people comparing themselves to others instead? Why let envy rule?
14. Has that guy even lived in Japan? Or he just pulls some nice looking stats on an Excel Table and says Japan is doing well?!?
15. Where is the chart of racial homogeneity of cold weather humans vs inequality?
    How can their be equality, like in the US, where Nordics (100 iq) and Blacks (85iq), live together?
    This seems like race denying rubbish.
16. High* income inequality. I don't want everyone to earn the same income.
17. Why the speaker omitted Singapore from the various charts?
18. Why do people give this person any attention as an economist when he has no credentials as one. All his claims are emotional and not based in facts and actual numbers. He also make a lot of false comparisons that are (at best) irrelevant. He assumes correlation and causation are the same thing. He also puts lots of comparisons in his charts that have no basis for being there.
19. it's first time for me to watch ted video.But,I cannot understand the relationship between social inequality and the grape that he offer.he just suggest the index which has not objectivity,but just plausible. why R.wilkinson choose these indexes such as trust each person etc.....can you explian me?or is that the characteristic of ted?
20. Societies differ only by degree of wealth inequality that exists. Poverty is a common denominator. Another common denominator is the concentrated ownership and control over land (whether in the cities or in rural regions) and over natural resources. No form of government has meaningfully altered the accelerated growth in the power of rentier (i.e., non-producing) interests in every society. Efforts at land nationalization or land redistribution have little real lasting impact on income and wealth distribution. There is only one means of addressing this problem, which is for societies to begin to collect the rent (or, more specifically, the potential annual rental value of all parcels or tracts of land) of land and land-like assets, such as the broadcast spectrum or even take-off and landing slots at airports. Taxes on those who actually produce tangible wealth or provide needed services can then be lifted. Taxes on capital goods (i.e., buildings, machinery, technologies) can be lifted. And, taxes on commerce can be lifted.