Banned TED Talk: Nick Hanauer “Rich people don’t create jobs”
Econintersect: Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist, was one of the first investors in Amazon.com. He is co-founder of Second Avenue Partners, a Seattle venture capital firm. He was the founder of gear.com which merged into Overstock.com and Avenue A Media which, after a name change to aQuantitative, was acquired by Micrcosoft. According to Celebrity Networth, Hanauer has a personal net worth of $1 billion.
YouTube access to the 6 minute video is later in the article.
From the YouTube site:
Published on May 17, 2012
Via Business Insider: “As the war over income inequality wages on, super-rich Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has been raising the hackles of his fellow 1-percenters, espousing the contrarian argument that rich people don’t actually create jobs. The position is controversial — so much so that TED is refusing to post a talk that Hanauer gave on the subject. National Journal reports today that TED officials decided not to put Hanauer’s March 1 speech up online after deeming his remarks “too politically controversial” for the site…”.
Econintersect has found several references, including this one on MSNBC, indicating that Ted Talks relented and did post the talk. However, when Econintersect tried to locate it today (17 March 2013) the following screen shot displays all that was found. If the talk is posted it apparently is not indexed.
The talk is available on YouTube where all posts Econintersect has looked at say that it is banned by Ted Talks, but the dates of posting are all 17 or 18 May 2011.
Not all agree that the talk was the “truth.” Tim Worstall, Forbes, wrote the following:
Bruce Upbin here at Forbes has a good post with almost all of the links that you need. See the speech, read the outrage at the National Journal, see what TED said about said speech (“we didn’t post it because it’s not very good” seems to be the line). As Bruce says:
It was just a case of the TED organizers deciding that this particular presentation was categorically mediocre, a conclusion with which I firmly concur.
At which point I’m afraid I must disagree. It was worse than mediocre: it was deeply ignorant of the very subject under discussion. (Emphasis added by Econintersect.)
At the risk of oversimplification, Econintersect will summarize the Worstall position: Capital is more valuable to the economy than is labor. Of course we can go to another extreme and refer to Karl Marx who argued that labor was more important to the economy than capital.
Econintersect expects that Worstall would not acept the characterization of his position as “extreme.” How would Karl Marx react to the same characterization for his thinking? It is likely that each would consider the other to be extreme and their own thinking to be soundly grounded. So the reader will have to determine for himself (herself) if either is or both are extreme.
Sources: Links in article.
