This is what saddens me the most. We are no longer able to have any real discusion about anything anymore because pretty much everything can be stuffed into a "partisan" pigeonhole.

   -- Shrinking Middle Class == Partisan
   -- Failing Healthcare System == Partisan
   -- War on Women's Rights == Partisan

Now, on the face of it, sure, any of these topics can be construed as "partisan", but I had hoped, especially with outfits like TED, that we could get beyond that and focus on the "grey areas", the "parts in the middle", and try to have an honest intellectual debate.

But we're not allowed that anymore, even Intellectualism is partisan now since it's "so Elitist".

Welcome to the era of Politically Correct Stagnant Decline.

There's also something to be said about the novelty of the information that is presented.

TED is about exciting ideas (or at least, that's what I understand them to be).

From the talk: "In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich."

That is his "exciting idea" -- something that pretty much anyone who is interested in tax reform has heard before. There was nothing groundbreaking about it, no new information, and certainly no unique solution to the problem. It was literally a reiteration of political talking points that have existed for a very long time, which to be frank, is not very interesting. I even remember Mark Cuban blogging about this very same topic a few months ago, and this is an idea that isn't particularly unique.

Still, since he was invited to speak, I think his video should be part of TED's web site, but saying that he was bringing any new discussion to the table is quite generous.

Instead of implying that its motivations were political, TED could have simply said this: "The talk was interesting, but we had other talks we wanted to feature first." Boom. Done. No PR headaches.

I think this is a more generous summary of Anderson's intentions from the article: "Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media."

The talk didn't present anything new, so it doesn't need to be featured.

Not all the speeches make it from the conference to the website. My TedX speech also didn't make it :)

Those problems aren't "partisan topics" just because one party adamantly wants to make them worse!

> So now it's unfairly partisan to point out that the evidence supports one party's position but not the other's?

I come down way on the side of Hanauer in this debate, and agree with your point above, in general. But my reading of the speech was that it was a partisan fluff piece.

If you asked any number of my liberal college-educated friends to vamp for three minutes on the subject of "the wealthy as job-creators and drivers of economic growth" and then gave it a quick edit you'd get something comparable. The only difference being Hanauer makes a fallacious argument from authority (although I think his opinion is correct).

But isn't that exactly why TED didn't feature the talk? TED only wants its best talks on the web site, because the web site is its way of broadcasting interesting ideas (I know many teachers and professors that regularly share TED talks with students!). I understand their desire for a really well-curated collection of videos.

Considering some of the TED talks I've seen in the past, Hanauer's talk doesn't make the cut. I could've just as easily gone to MSNBC and heard the same thing -- although I agree with his opinion, his idea is neither unique nor substantiated by unique data.

I think I have a stricter definition of evidence. I saw a lot of arguments (many that I agree with generally), but not anything I would call evidence. If he wants to prove what he is saying is true, show the empirical evidence. A lot of people argue their opinion, which is fine, but in the end it is just opinion.

The claim of partisanship is an outright falsehood. The partisanship is in Chris Anderson's reason for not distributing the talk, not the talk itself. He is making it partisan, by cowing to that which we call partisanship, a thing he must surely take for granted. Maybe he is evil, too.

There is nothing partisan about it. The 1% are not a party, any more than a single senator is a party. The ability of the Corporate Rich to spin the public argument, and make it seem like there is a split conflict, that is the root of what we "end-users" perceive as partisanship. In this case, they have spun & won. The public discussion about this talk is partisanship, not the issue itself.

And Hanauer points this out. The spin of the conversation is influencing the outcome of policy. This is not new under the sun, but it is an idea worth spreading.

This is a really bizarre move by TED. If they don't release all their videos because they just don't have the capacity or whatever, fine. But to not release a video because it sort of supports one side of the political spectrum is completely absurd. I thought TED was _supposed_ to be provocative?

Shame on Chris Anderson for the poor handling of this.

The talk is interesting but the suggested solution at the end, more taxes on the rich, is highly political and no evidence what-so-ever is offered in the talk that that's the correct solution for fixing the stated inequality problem.