This is an awesome TED Talk because it brings out a number of large lessons, ones I would suggest we apply to our own society. For example, if we have wasted nearly all of our foreign aid efforts for developing nations, perhaps we are wasting all our federal efforts to fix local issues in the same manner.
With all this is the stark statement that is actually one of respect, namely, “if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone.”
Also, there are economic lessons to be learned by the simple statement, “Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy.”
One further excerpt on that …
So what I’m saying is that entrepreneurship is where it’s at. We are at the end of the first industrial revolution — nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing — and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. The technologies do not exist to do that. Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! Government? Forget about it! It will be entrepreneurs, and they’re doing it now.
I’m afraid I cannot buy the idea that free-market pioneers can ‘save the planet’ because of their freedom of movement and/or thought, when it is that very market that perpetuates mass murder by neglect in the under-developed world.
Could you explain the concept of “mass murder by neglect”? Are you saying that we should extend and establish Free Market in those places to solve the problem, or that Free Market is the problem?
The latter, Ken, and my reference to mass murder by neglect [and expressly NOT manslaughter as distinguished in British law, since premeditation is involved in these deaths ,even if not on an individualised basis] is to massive levels of avoidable premature death caused by lack of access to clean water/cheap or free medication/food etc, all of which is a consequence of free market ideology and activity.
So you are saying it intentional. But “neglect” implies the welfare of such parties is the responsibility of some caretaker. The speakers argument, after all, is that we need to STOP being caretakers, and if anything, extend our markets to them and help them develop their own according to their own will and foster reciprocation.
As to “lack of access to clean water/cheap or free medication/food etc, all of which is a consequence of free market ideology and activity” … could you make a case for this?
It is my understanding that primary cause of economic conditions in developing nations was colonialism, which is hardly a free market, but the monopolies of government-sponsored agents imposing themselves on conquered peoples.
In today’s times I have posited this view, which explains where I am coming from and likely why your assertion is not obvious to me.
https://considerreconsider.com/2011/addressing-the-conditions-of-economic-oppression/