Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Income inequalities and how they hurt

The traditional economist in me has trouble with this.  Why would people care if others have more than they do?  If I am happy, it should not matter if my neighbor gets $20,000 or $200,000 or $200,000,000 a year so long as (s)he has enough to live.

On the other side has been a growing field of research that has shown that inequalities hurt the overall "happiness" and even the health of residents of a country.  While we cover some of it in Behavioral Finance class, I was surprised by the enormity of the findings.

Worth watching even if you may not agree with all of it.






2 comments:

Alex said...

This is a great TED video. Also on I hadn't seen before. Having never looked into such data I was rather shocked by the findings, I guess it makes sense though. Will anything ever change? I doubt it.

Anonymous said...

Why do you think the lowest and highest rates of US high school dropouts are in the south/midwest?