Too Political for TED

[brekin]

JackRiddler wrote:
Wow. I read the TED statement first and wondered if they were being unfairly pilloried. Then I watched the video.

Yep, too political. This is open and shut. There's nothing "partisan" in what he said. The problem is that it's too true and too simply so. Also, he gets a standing ovation at the end, no question.

Simulist wrote:

I had the same experience: I read the TED statement first, also.

But, after watching the video, I see clearly that you're absolutely right: "The problem is that it's too true and too simply so."

Agreed. Immediately he states how partisanship isn't helpful in viewing the problem.
0.12 "..If taxes go up on the rich. Job creation will go down. This idea is an article of faith for Republicans and seldom challenged by Democrats."

[MacCruiskeen]

So a young multi-millionaire venture-capitalist suggests, very politely, that the rich should pay more in tax, and he gets drowned in a torrent of slime:

For the record, pretty much everyone at TED, including me, worries a great deal about the issue of rising inequality. We've carried talks on it in the past, like this one from Richard Wilkinson. We'd carry more in the future if someone can find a way of framing the issue that is convincing and avoids being needlessly partisan in tone.

Yeuch.

TED has always had that yeuchy quality about it. I can't define it briefly, but it has something to do with the fact that everyone gets a standing ovation there. All TED talks are business-motivation talks. You too can be a world-famous deaf female Aberdonian percussionist! Where there's a will there's a way. Hanauer broke the mould and the tacit consensus by showing that, even with a will, there is not always a way.

Credit to the audience for applauding him, but maybe it was just force of habit. They were probably up on their feet before they even noticed he was a lefty.

[JackRiddler]

TED has always had that yeuchy quality about it. I can't define it briefly, but it has something to do with the fact that everyone gets a standing ovation there. All TED talks are business-motivation talks. You too can be a world-famous deaf female Aberdonian percussionist! Where there's a will there's a way. Hanauer broke the mould and the tacit consensus by showing that, even with a will, there is not always a way.

Credit to the audience for applauding him, but maybe it was just force of habit. They were probably up on their feet before they even noticed he was a lefty.

Your comments apply to the format and style and marketing and groupthinky self-praise of it. And there is a plenitude of techno/data worship. But many of the talks really are brilliant, or simply useful to understanding things. Most recently that I saw, find the one by actor Thandie Newton. There are about as many lefties doing TED talks as you find on C-SPAN (which, by granting a 10-20 percent space to lefties and non-conformists, as spice to the interminable think tank bullshit from AEIHeritageCatoBrookingsArmyWarCollege et al., is almost 10-20 percent ahead of all other corporate network platforms).

[Project Willow]

Among those I've not yet forgotten, the women are taking over talk, the talk about female orgasm that addressed the upsuck question, the string of nasty comments on Youtube in response to an Eve Ensler talk, and the artist who managed to make a work out of every contemporary art concept imaginable, instead of just one.

[Usrename]

I had to watch the Richard Wilkinson piece that was being touted as non-partisan, just to see what that means to those folks at TED (of course there was nothing at all partisan about the original talk) and there's something that disturbs me 2:30 into it. There is a graph showing that the richest quintile in the USA has less than 10 times the wealth of the poorest quintile.

That cannot possibly be correct, can it? That has to be complete bullshit, doesn't it?

Could that be why they like the Richard Wilkinson talk so much? Because it's total bullshit?

[JackRiddler]

The first paragraph might be reductive, but funny!

http://wonkette.com/472868/ted-people-n ... ore-472868

TED People Nix Income Inequality Chat In Favor Of More Prissy Totebagging Social Media Efficiency Crap

by Jim Newell
12:25 pm May 17, 2012


Do you kids like the TED talks? They’re a series of conferences where David Brooks pretends to explain scientific innovation or a “social media pioneer” babbles about how clicking a new computer button on a computer program will save Africa or… well, let’s just see what the top video on their website is right now: “David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence.” We’d rather listen to John McCain sing Ke$ha. “Bart Knols: Cheese, dogs, and pills to end malaria.” Oh my god. “Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time.” Whatever, fraud. “José Bowen: Beethoven the businessman.” Each one is just a fresh new apocalypse. Why not post a talk about, say, the major socioeconomic issue of our era, income inequality and stability? Apparently this would have been too “political” for the TED folks, so they won’t post it online. This deserves some extraordinarily negative feedback.

National Journal had the great scoop of how these Idea Leaders thought it would be too “political” to distribute an actual worthwhile chat that might make some Republicans (or corporate donors) sad:

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.”

Sounds pretty perfect and relevant and backed by empirical data. Well done, organizers! BUT THEN WHAT HAPPENED?

You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting. [...]

Hanauer’s talk “probably ranks as one of the most politically controversial talks we’ve ever run, and we need to be really careful when” to post it, Anderson wrote on April 6. “Next week ain’t right. Confidentially, we already have Melinda Gates on contraception going out. Sorry for the mixed messages on this.”

And then Anderson had a patronizing little email chat with Hanauer about how he was wrong about stuff:

In a May 7 email to Hanauer, forwarded to NJ, Anderson took issue with several of Hanauer’s assertions in the talk, including the idea that businesspeople aren’t job creators. He also made clear his aversion to the “political” nature of the talk.

“I agree with your language about ecosystems, and your dismissal of some of the mechanistic economy orthodoxy, yet many of your own statements seem to go further than those arguments justify,” Anderson wrote.

“But even if the talk was rated a home run, we couldn’t release it, because it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political. We’re in the middle of an election year in the US. Your argument comes down firmly on the side of one party. And you even reference that at the start of the talk. TED is nonpartisan and is fighting a constant battle with TEDx organizers to respect that principle….

Chris Anderson is everything that is wrong with the world right now and should self-deport to a remote cave forever.

Questioning the notion of the rich as "job creators" qualifies as "one of the most politically controversial talks they've ever run"? Really?

.

[Forgetting2]

Questioning the notion of the rich as "job creators" qualifies as "one of the most politically controversial talks they've ever run"? Really?

.

To someone who holds American style capitalism as an article of faith, along the lines of 'thou shall not kill,' it might seem so. It's kinda' hard to get into the head of someone when the space is so small. There's no elbow room.

[Usrename]

I knew that their "good example" of how to do an economic inequality speech was a bullshit.

When I look at the 2004 data, it shows that the poorest Americans (those in the lowest 25%) each own less than $5,000 in wealth while the richest Americans (those in the top 25%) each own more than $250,000.

How is it possible that the graph at 2:30 into the talk, the one showing the income disparity between rich and poor, is less than tenfold (actually eight and 1/2 times) between the top and bottom quintile in the USA?

They are only wrong by several magnitudes.

[JackRiddler]

Questioning the notion of the rich as "job creators" qualifies as "one of the most politically controversial talks they've ever run"? Really?

.

To someone who holds American style capitalism as an article of faith, along the lines of 'thou shall not kill,' it might seem so. It's kinda' hard to get into the head of someone when the space is so small. There's no elbow room.

Just because they're not burning him at the stake for heresy doesn't mean we're no longer suffering Medieval delusions and attitudes.

[Forgetting2]

Just because they're not burning him at the stake for heresy doesn't mean we're no longer suffering Medieval delusions and attitudes.

Completely agree. As you said up-thread, the premise is too simple and too true. Their perception of it, though, is delusional and their attitude confrontational and aggressively protective. In a situation like that what the hell do you say to somebody who persists in calling it a partisan rant? It can't really be made any clearer... You're just living on fundamentally different planets. It's just something I have a hard time fathoming, when trying to propose that Capitalism is flawed at the core to even my most liberal friends, how quickly the discussion becomes emotional, and I'm suddenly being called a Marxist or whatever other dismissive term they find useful.

In this case it becomes partisan because the TED people won't let it be anything else, even as we know it isn't. To let that slip from their grasp might risk 'world view' collapse. And that way lies madness

[JackRiddler]

Forgetting2: Yes and yes.

We should say this guy's presentation is not for or against capitalism. It doesn't address the private ownership of the means of production, or the sovereignty of accumulated investment capital, or that jobs are in and of themselves a good thing. The fundamental thesis is about how capitalism works, whether you like it or not. He's saying investment and therefore jobs follow demand. Macroeconomically, demand is the job creator. By this standard, TED would have banned Keynes from speaking.

[Forgetting2]

We should say this guy's presentation is not for or against capitalism. It doesn't address the private ownership of the means of production, or the sovereignty of accumulated investment capital, or that jobs are in and of themselves a good thing. The fundamental thesis is about how capitalism works, whether you like it or not. He's saying investment and therefore jobs follow demand. Macroeconomically, demand is the job creator. By this standard, TED would have banned Keynes from speaking.

True. (One thing that bothered me in his talk was his advocating the idea that if the middle class had more money in their pockets, they could all buy more stuff, without a nod to the paradox of endless growth in a finite world. One of capitalism's - in it's current form, or maybe all its forms - worst problems.)

I'd still like to see a thread on economy here which acts as a 'utopian build it up from scratch', how would you do it, in broad strokes. What are the basic rules, bringing the wide range of ideas here, including the great work of Graebers and whoever else. An RI Sim city/country/world sort of thing.

[JackRiddler]

Cannonfire:

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2012/05/bus-ted.html

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Bus-TED
The libertarian conspiracy...

(Shall I work that phrase into every post from now on? Well, I'll try.)

...has spent millions of dollars making the public believe that rich people are "job creators." When Nick Hanauer -- a billionaire venture capitalist, and thus presumably not a Jesus-hating Marxist -- offered up a challenge to that doctrine in his TED talk, he was censored. Reason given: His view was "too controversial."

Oh really? Here's a sample of what he said:

I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

For crying out loud. That's controversial?

I can recall a time when that sentiment would have been considered about as controversial as saying that water is wet. Back in the '70s, a politician might have said those exact same words from the podium at the Republican convention. Everyone in the audience would have thought: "Of course. In the end, it's all about the consumer. The customer is king."

Now, we live in an age when the average consumer is considered an impediment to the efficient running of the economy. On Wall Street, the bankers treat their customers the way grifters treat rubes -- or, better, the way muggers treat muggees.

The only thing holding back hiring is lack of demand. The problem is not unions or regulations or unpredictability or sunspots or an imminent attack from Loki and the Chitauri. The problem is the fact that Mr. and Ms. Average don't have any long green in their wallets. The Libertarians want all workers to segue into the lumpenprole lifestyle, sleeping in old cars and feasting on cold hot dogs -- and then those same "conservative" geniuses cannot understand why the working class no longer purchases goods and services.

TED stands revealed as just another libertarian propaganda forum. Awful Ayn used to exist on the fringe; now, from beyond the grave, she sets the party line. Deviationists must be re-educated or sent to Lubianka. To paraphrase Dick Nixon, we're all Randroids now.

[Jerky]

Questioning the notion of the rich as "job creators" qualifies as "one of the most politically controversial talks they've ever run"? Really?

Yup. Really.

We are there.

[Jerky]

My experience was the same as many of yours.

I read TED's self-defense first, and I was almost won over. But then I thought I'd better invest the five minutes to check out the video and see if they were bullshitting.

I watched the video.

They were bullshitting.

Thanks, TED, for bathing yourselves in a great big megawatt spotlight of evil. Makes it ever so much simpler to figure out who the bad guys are when they come right out and admit it.

YOPJ