TED Community » Quinn McKinsey

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• A comment on Talk: Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade?

  Nov 11 2011: At 12:07 of the video, his error becomes apparent. He believes countries should be labeled as Western or Developing depending on the life style of the people and not their philosophies of how they come to that life style. At 12:07 he shows all the countries moving to the lower left of the chart. The question that everyone should ask at this point is "How do they move to the lower left?". He takes special note of China, as in the China with a one child policy. In other words, apparently to Mr Rosling the ends justifies the means. I applaud Mr Rosling for looking at the data, but Mr Rosling needs to understand that correlation and causality are two very different things.
  
  Also, if you go to his gapminder.org site and look at
  "Child mortality (0-5 years-olds dying per 1,000 born)" vs
  "Children per woman (total fertility)" at 1960,
  you may want to take note that North Korea is in his Western World box.
  See link: www.bit.ly/v77RTx

• A comment on Conversation: Reinventing government - what would it look like?

  Apr 21 2011: Governence doesn't really have to do with technology and everything to do with people. It seems to me that most of the ideas expressed in this forum have to do with more fairly distributing power. However, almost everyones response has been to simply move power from one group to another so as to give themselves the most influence. If you really want to gain more influence then the goal should be to have as many competing factions as possible, because the fewer there are, then the less likely it is that your opinion will matter. If politicians are underhanded/transparent in dealing with each other or the people, then all it does is add/remove an extra dimension to/from the problem. This also seems to be a general theme as most of the suggestions below amount to removing some dimensions and adding others. The idea that it is the people against the corporations or governments is silly because the people are not the only group they have to deal with. The people act more as a power base for when the corporations and governments battle one another. He who controls the ideas of the people wins. The institutions act just like people, they do what is in their best interest. With that said, I would think the best I idea would be to encourage policies that cause them to compete more, not less. That would throw out one world government as well as lasse-faire; due to lasse-faire resulting in a monopoly if government doesn't intervene. Would like to hear your thoughts.