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Comment by ctchocula | Hacker News Reader

I heard this guy on "Your Call" which is produced by NPR yesterday. One of the things he said that really got my attention is that he said to get a seat at a TED talk, you need to pay $5000, which really limits the attendance at TED talks to the wealthy. Another thing was, the speaker is censored--he or she cannot use the word "inequality", but can only use the word "poverty". That just blows my mind. Inequality is one of the ways economics is changing with Thomas Piketty who points out how inequality has increased way more in United States than in Europe since the 1970s. To not be able to point to that as one of the problems facing the world and to claim you want to change the world is madness.

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https://www.ted.com/topics/inequality

I'm not saying there's no valid criticisms of TED, or even really endorsing it, but the claim you report clearly can't be strictly true - there are TED talks with "inequality" in the title.

I haven't watched the video myself, but he could be referencing Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist from Seattle, whose speech at the TED University conference titled "Rich people don't create jobs" was deemed "too politically controversial" to post on their web site.

I clicked your link. Even though there is an article at the bottom with "inequality" in the title, I tried doing a search but couldn't find a single talk with "inequality" in the title. It is a possible tag, but cannot be found in the title.

Edit: Snopes says the story of "censorship" was disseminated by Nick Hanauer's PR team after TED decided not to promote the story: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/banned-ted-talk-nick-hanau...

On finding talks with "inequality" in the title: they do not show on the first page, but I found two by clicking 'See all 114 talks on Inequality' and then clicking on through the results pages; ie "A visual history of inequality in industrial America", and "How economic inequality harms societies", so two of that 114 search results.

Isn't global inequality decreasing though? Isn't extreme poverty decreasing? https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality

People tend to only care about the inequality where they stand the most to gain. Most US citizens would benefit from wealth redistribution in US, but unhappy with a global redistribution since they would average down.

In some ways globalization is causing both increasing economic equality for labor and increasing inequality for capital providers.

Ted started off great and has turned into a complete joke. Got the money? Come and talk. Have a controversial idea - sure, it's worth spreading. I've come to accept TED as entertainment more so than anything factual. If facts are there, they have to be checked.

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