TED
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2012–2016
16:55 · 1.3M views · Oct 24, 2011
Richard Wilkinson presents data showing that societies with larger income gaps do worse on health, lifespan, trust and other measures. He argues the effects track inequality itself rather than average income. It is a 17-minute TED talk.
HN commenters cite it in inequality debates as a compact summary of studies linking inequality to worse social outcomes.
4 comments from Hacker News
You seem to be talking about average wealth and social mobility. This is different from inequality, which is about the distance from the bottom to the top. Some of these results are counter intuitive. For example: There's data to show that the top quartile of earners in low inequality countries live longer than their top quartile counterparts in high inequality countries, even if the high inequality counterparts earn much more both in absolute and relative terms. Edit: Since this is getting downvoted, here's a talk that spends 17 minutes listing studies showing that this is in fact about inequality, not average income. this video
- Secondly, assuming that the "inequality gap" is necessarily a bad thing, which I don't think anyone has shown Actually they have. [LINK] this video In face increasing Gini coefficient for 0.01 increases mortality in state for 122% after 12 years. Yes, it is a bad thing in almost all recorded metrics. - First of all, doesn't anyone see the correlation between increased government power (revenue/spending) Nope. I think revenue spending isn't really good metric of government power and so far no one has proved that. You are free to test your hypothesis though. I'd wager that there is quite a bit of income inequality if your gov. revenue is low but they spend a lot of money.
One thing that always bothers me about wealth distribution is that you can't simply move wealth around and expect things to get better. Things have gotten better in countries which have reduced inequality: this video Don't confuse persons with populations. They are not the same thing. A person is very different from a population.
Nobody serious said inequality was bad or good Lots of very serious people say that inequality is bad: [LINK] this video [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]