I really, really enjoy the TED talks. I had the goofy notion that they had integrity.

Not so much, it seems:

There’s one idea, though, that TED’s organizers recently decided was too controversial to spread (National Journal, Jim Tankersley): the notion that widening income inequality is a bad thing for America, and that as a result, the rich should pay more in taxes.

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”

“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

This is worse than finding out there wasn't a Santa.

Seriously.

There is a conversation about TED's suppression of this talk starting now. I suspect you will see some change occur over the next few days. This controversy is just hours old.

But the snow is already yellow.

Ugh, I really enjoy TED talks too. There are tons of fascinating subjects and presenters.

I won't stop hunting them down, but now there will be the thought "what are they not allowing this time" and for what reason.

TED Talks has a couple of other talks on intra-society income inequality and its effects.

Richard Wilkinson talks primarily about effects of income inequality on lifespan, health in general, stress, "trust," and other non-economic effects.

Bryan Stevenson gives what may be the most powerful of all TED Talks to date, in which he focuses on the criminal justice system, race, and poverty.

Far more TED Talks concern inter-society inequalities. Hans Rosling has several such talks (and is optimistic). Jody Williams (Nobel Laureate) talks about what might lead to world peace. Resolution of injustice and inequality, not modern weapons, are key to her vision.

I am disappointed that TED Talks does not have more on income and wealth inequality in the U.S. One of the aims of the Occupy movement has been to get people talking (again) about income inequality in the U.S. and other countries. They have yet to be able to communicate that idea in simple, effective ways. Part of the problem may be that income inequality is not a major topic of discussion in economics classes on university campuses. It is over in the Sociology and Women's Studies departments that people pay more attention to statistical distributions and standard deviations. We are apparently not very good at teaching about that.

FWIW, the talk by Nick Hanauer was not in the TED Talks series. It was given in a local TED-x event. These are often organized by universities, community organizations, and even individuals. This was a "TED University" talk. They can be of several formats. A common one is to show a TED Talk and open the floor for discussion. Original presentations are sometimes given. They are put on the Web far less frequently than are TED Talks.

Among the statements about "what you will find at every TED-x event" is a fundamental TED principle:

Many conservatives might argue that TED Talks favor the left, but that may well be because the facts favor the left.

I don't want to defend Chris Anderson's decision not to post the video of what Hanauer had to say, particularly since that is not exactly what Anderson did. Anderson qualified his statement with "we need to be really careful when" to post it. I don't read that as saying that Hanauer's talk will never be posted; I read it as saying that it might be posted after the election.

I think that courageous, fed-up Democrats can and must carry Hanauer's message to the people. They need to do so to counter the class warfare being waged by modern Republicans.

FTFY

You are right, and some people who are not Democrats are already carrying this message. Republicans used to do so.

In fairness, here's the answer from the TED folks.

The talk was not mediocre, IMHO; it was just good. I liked how he brought in the cultural aspects of the idea of the rich being "job creators" and therefore superior, although I doubt that any entrepreneur other than Donald Trump has ever thought of himself or herself as the Creator. "Masters of the Universe" was more their style.

The problem, as I see it, is that he did not demonstrate that there is a connection between job creation and marginal tax rates. He did not show widely available statistics about where new jobs are created. He talked about a very real phenomenon: the growing income inequality in the U.S. However, he did not really go anywhere with that fact. I could not use that talk with students to convince them that the rich do not create jobs. They would walk away wondering who does.

TED tries to publish "excellent" talks. I would say this was not an excellent talk.

If I were at TED, I would challenge him to try to come up with the talk that he wanted to give, using the standard 18-minute format. And leave out the squirrel and Donald Trump.

I thought it necessary to post the explanation since I posted the criticism.

I didn't agree with the explanation.

Transcript for Nick Hanauer's talk.

I'm sad to find out Amazon.com is a front group for Communist-Muslim-Islamofascist-Marxist-Socialist take over of America.

I think it's a good, succinct summary of what's wrong with our economy right now. It's not a scholarly talk, but it's something that's not being said nearly enough about what's wrong with our economy: the lack of demand for goods and services, caused by the lack of spending power of the non-rich.

I don't know, if he needed to go all Al Gore, Jr. with power points and en-route to a Nobel Prize, but this is a good starting point to get people talking about how businesses actually operate.

Income tax policy isn't a major consideration for a business, in terms of how they plan for things. You do have some capital investments and debt decisions based on tax benefits, but the basic methods of determining how much a good costs to produce and how much it should be priced are not done in after tax dollars. You can't raise the price of widgets by 5% because the marginal income tax rate was increased by 5%, in order to off-set the higher tax rate, because so many other factors determine how much people want to spend on widgets and on what you pay for the materials to build widgets and if you'll even make a profit, in order to owe taxes in the first place.

Right-wingers have hi-jacked the debate about taxes and job creation to the point that middle-class right-wingers truly believe "you should thank a rich person for the job you have" and "only the rich can create jobs" or to summarize "you've never gotten a job from a poor person, therefore thank the rich for the job you have."

Tolland, my friend, you and I both know this is more true than not.



My dad was my hero for this simple thing. He was a journalist. He would talk about his work sometimes and make sure we knew that "... Although you'd think that would be true, doesn't it feel like it's true? The fact is when you really dig into it, you often find that the opposite is true."

Ha taught us to look behind the feeling. He made us aware that what we believe is sometimes just a feeling.