TED talks: the rise of the new global super-rich – Chrystia Freeland

“We are living in an age of surging income inequality”, says Canadian writer and politician Chrystia Freeland in this week’s featured TED talk.

A shift in wealth and the subsequent income gap between the richest and the poorest is most striking in the UK and the US, she adds.

But what is causing such a shift? Freeland argues it’s technology and globalisation.

Today, the 0.1% of the top earners in the US account for more than 8% of the national income. Whilst the 400 top earning Americans have seen their wealth quintuple in the last three decades, the middle and lower classes have seen their income stagnate, or even decrease.

In 2005, a US study found that the wealth of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the richest men in the world, was equivalent to the bottom 120 million Americans.

Freeland explains in her TED talk how society and the economy can become fairer and more balanced so that everyone can benefit.