The Ted Talk Everyone Should Watch

Over the course of the semester, we’ve seen our fair share of Ted Talks – but one we didn’t watch (and one I think is incredibly pertinent to our ongoing discussion) is James B. Glattfelder’s “Who Controls the World.” It is an incredibly eye-opening view of how complexity – the study of complex, interconnected systems – are more than the sum of their parts. This, it turns out, is also a fantastic way of looking at national and global economies – a study of his which shows just how dangerous it can be to have such massive amounts of wealth and power in the hands of so few. It’s the things like this that we need to bring attention to because of the inherent flow of information in today’s society. Because such a choice few own all the major media outlets we all have access to (an irony unlike any other when you figure out right-biased and left-biased news stations are owned by the same CEO somewhere) – stories like Glattfelder’s tend to get conveniently ignored.