While the speaker, Richard
Wilkinson, did account for irregularities in certain societies in some of his
data, for the most part, everything was pretty constant throughout. Based on
the data presented, I think economic inequality is a big problem that the US
needs to address. Wilkinson spent a majority of this 15 minuets discussing the
correlations of income inequality with things like infant mortality, crime,
mental illness and trust. Most of his examples checked out with his theory.
However, one thing that I did not particularly like is that he only picked
topics that would make a country look bad. This sounds cliché, but why would
they not check for things like happiness and college degrees received? Could it
be because it would alter the data in a way that would disprove their theory?
Another thing that I was not found of was the fact that Wilkinson spent the
entirety of his time on Ted Talks, talking about data that can be easily found
by the public. Why not use the time given to come up with solutions to the
problem. Especially if you feel so strongly about them to make several charts
explaining them. That is a big problem with our society. We are talkers and not
do-ers. We would rather talk for 15 minuets about why economic inequality is
bad, when we all know its bad, instead of coming up with solutions. Most people
that watch This video is also not targeting all of the people they are
discussing. The only people that are going to watch and listen to this man
ramble on for 15 minuets and show a ton of graphs that are hard to follow are
either students who are required to watch or people at the event. While I do
think economic inequality is an issue, I do not think this video does a good
job at telling us why or how we can fix the problem.
First of all, I do think that economic inequality is a problem that Americans should take seriously and try to solve. Based on the data Richard Wilkinson showed me regarding the relationship between economic inequality and some social problems, and since US is one of the country that has the greatest gap between the rich and the poor, we can easily see how economic inequality could affect things like “life expectancy, kids' maths and literacy scores, infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness -- which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction -- and social mobility.” So I think there is no doubt that we should take it as a big problem if it’s true. Now, talking about things the blog didn’t like about the speech, topic choosing, I think Richard Wilkinson did address this in the speech, “I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis. Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. Otherwise that would introduce bias.” So I think it should not be a big problem. But I do agree though, that he gave too much time talking about why it is true instead of how to solve this problem, even though he did talk about things like pre-tax when talking about japan and Sweden and he gave some general solution at the end of the video.
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