TED Community » Saurabh Rao

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Climbing, hiking, and all sorts of other things that seem irrelevant here :)

An idea worth spreading

Our brains have developed beyond what we need to survive in the natural world, so we're creating a more complicated world that can keep our brain entertained. The meaning of life, did someone ask?

People don't know that I'm good at

Empathising

Comments

• TEDCred score: 0.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Talk: Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

  Oct 30 2011: York, income differentials are rising at the same time that rights differentials are falling. Surely capitalism has some good consequences as well? Or do you deny the link between capitalism and human rights? Have you forgotten that every socialist/ communist regime the world has seen has been associated with rights abuses?
  
  Sure, there are plenty of rights abuses in countries like the US, and the rich get away with a lot, but can you imagine a Cuban senior government official having to resign in shame after having been outed for abusing his position to escape a traffic violation? How about people thrown in prison for opposing the state? Could you organise a Occupy protest in Soviet Russia in favour of capitalism?
  
  Just because the Anglo Saxon capitalist model has some flaws doesn't mean all capitalist models are flawed, or that it is totally flawed

• A reply on Talk: Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

  Oct 30 2011: I disagree with Epstein (from the PBS video). Firstly, innovation is also driven by factors other than the desire to accumulate wealth. Secondly, the desire to accumulate wealth is strong enough that being 200 times richer than the average man will probably mean just as much as being 2000 times richer.
  
  If however you factor in the role of expectations, Epstein could have a point. If you think you have the right to be 2000 times richer but are limited to being 200 times richer, you will end up being discouraged from wealth creation. I suspect that discouragement will not be enough to result in you not pursuing wealth creating activities, but if one accepts the direction to take (i.e. reducing inequality), surely the speed of achieving the goal can be adjusted such that such expectations are moderated over time. Epstein's arguments thus seem to be geared towards proving an existing position, rather than an explanation of why he believes hsi position is correct.

• A comment on Talk: Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

  Oct 30 2011: Capitalism is basic human nature, and without capitalism most of the technology or products we currently have would not have been possible.. however that doesn't mean unbridled capitalism is good. Ofcourse making everyone equal by making everyone poor is a bad idea, but there *are* a few countries that have shown it is possible to incentivise surpluses and innovation with a slightly more balanced approach to capitalism than, say, the US. Sweden and Japan have spawned so many entrepreneurial ventures that I think people who argue for extreme wealth gaps as a necessary factor to incentivise entrepreneurial activity are driven by an agenda rather than logic.
  
  Richard Wilkinson's done a good job of demonstrating the correlation between inequality and unhappiness, but where do we go from here? Could you make the US a better place by wealth redistribution, or by restructuring incomes so that pre-tax inequalities reduce as well? Or is it a cultural thing - Is it that cultures where you are not pressured every single day to outshine everyone around you, result in more equal societies despite having the same capitalist economic order as, say, the US? If so, trying to reduce inequality using a top down approach would end in failure. And this cultural aspect isn't merely be in the economic sphere.
  
  Lastly, can I just point out that while inequality increases unhappiness, if you include all countries in the world, you'll find that on almost all these measures, the richer countries fare better than the poorer countries. If you also add factors like availability of rights as a factor in happiness (which I presume this study ignores because it is focused on the developed world where these rights are taken for granted), the correlation between average welfare and happiness would be very strong indeed. For all those people who want to take us back to the stone age by their knee jerk hatred of big corporations and banks: please bear this in mind.