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24 October 2011
How economic inequality harms societies: Richard Wilkinson on 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. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 16:55.)
Watch Richard Wilkinson’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
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Jan 20 2012
There’s some discussion here: http://www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/SpiritLevel.htm on whether correlation is being confused with causation. It’s not detailed, but it does point out that they’re probably aware of this criticism:
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Jan 27 2012
Of course he understands causation and is not confusing it. The problem as always in social science is doing all the disentangling, which is usually impossible. But I think it’s very interesting that many social ills are much more tightly correlated with income inequality than with GDP per capita. And before I’d criticize for confusing correlation with causation, I’d go read the original research source material, read the citations to work that seems to address that issue more carefully, and see how much more I learned. As it is, I find this to be as intriguing a 15 minute presentation as I’ve seen in a long time.
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Bill Sanders
Laudable goals, but I think Mr. Wilkinson is seriously confusing causation with correlation.