TED talks: your top five featured TED Talks

At Blue & Green Tomorrow, we like to spend our Friday afternoons sharing with you our favourite informative, enlightening, jaw-dropping TED talks.

As a special treat this week, we round up your favourites. These five clips are the featured TED talks most watched by our readers.

1. Does money make you mean? – Paul Piff

With the help of a rigged game of Monopoly, social psychologist Paul Piff shares some of his research into the behaviour of the wealthy.

Piff, a post-doctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, says that while inequality is a complex and daunting problem, it’s not all bad news.

To watch this video on the TED website, click here.

2. The death of innovation, the end of growth – Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon is one of the world’s most influential macroeconomists. Earlier in 2013, he gave a TED talk about how the death of innovation will signal the end of growth.

He says, “There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face: They’re demographics, education, debt and inequality, [and] they’re powerful enough to cut growth in half.”

As we wrote in January, we need a credible green innovation growth strategy.

David Cameron seems to get it. Sometimes. In a little-publicised speech in February, he said how the UK can become a showcase for green innovation.

“Are we going to grow?” Gordon asks.

“If so, that’s going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years.”

To watch this video on the TED website, click here.

3. The business logic of sustainability – Ray Anderson

In 2009, the late, great Ray Anderson – founder of carpet manufacturers Interface – gave a TED talk about the viability and logic of sustainable commerce.

Anderson had been fanatical about good business ever since reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce in 1994, and claimed that sustainability had saved his company $364 million over 10 years.

He promised that by 2020, Interface would cut out negative effects on the environment caused by its activities. Sadly, he died in 2011, but his legacy lives on through the Ray C Anderson Foundation, which was was set up in his honour shortly after his death.

To watch this video on the TED website, click here.

4. Hidden miracles of the natural world – Louie Schwartzberg

In this TED talk, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg reveals the unseeable beauty of the natural world in jaw-dropping detail.

The man behind the 3D film Mysteries of the Unseen World explains how, using high-speed cameras, timelapses and microscopes, he has uncovered connections, rhythms and patterns that are usually hidden from the human eye.

To watch this video on the TED website, click here.

5. Does the media have a ‘duty of care’? – David Puttnam

It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities, argues David Puttnam in this TED talk.

Does the media have a “duty of care” to create informed citizens? Puttnam, an award-winning filmmaker who is now a member of the House of Lords, certainly thinks so.

Filmed at TEDxHousesofParliament in June 2013, he says democracy – if done well – can achieve great things. But we have to trust making the decisions are acting in the best interests of everyone.

To watch this video on the TED website, click here.