Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).
This week we have Robert Neuwirth on the informal (mostly untaxed, unregulated) economy and Chrystia Freeland on a rise in the super rich.
Robert Neuwirth: The power of the informal economy
- Lagos — no streets for stores, so lady sells stuff from boat, comes to your home
- garbage dump — 2K people work there scavenging materials
- “alif” — a place in the world where everything exists (e.g., imagine a hyper-crowded flea market next to a camp)
- he calls this System D — the DIY economy, the economy of self-reliance; government hates DIY
- we’re focused on the “luxury economy” ($1.5T market) but this excludes 2/3 of the world’s workers
- P&G’s largest market segment is actually the informal economy: tiny stores, street hawkers selling detergent (and it’s the only segment that’s growing)
- Nigeria is the “big dog in Africa” — 1 in 7 Africans are Nigerian
- M-Tel — only sells airtime, sells through street vendors
- tons of Guangdong (China) phones going to Nigeria
- for large brands, “piracy is research” — not going to buy their products anyway, and lets them learn where their products are hot
- Siemens paid $2B in bribes, yet we demonize the little guys
Chrystia Freeland: The rise of the new global super-rich
- as income inequality increases, social mobility decreases
- today we live in the era of superstars in every industry — even dentists!
- while the rise in the top 1%’s wealth is astonishing, rise in 0.1% is even more extreme
- how GM employs 100K, FB only employs thousands
- today productivity increases are decoupled from wage increases
Here’s the full list of TED notes!