Watched the first video on redistribution of wealth.
With regard to the videography:
- Overall it seemed pretty good. If economics were a topic I was interested in I would probably check out your videos.
- One comment that I would make is that while you were on screen I naturally watched you and listened to what you said. While you were showing static images or text I would quickly take them in and then my attention would wander. Personally I don't think the CEO mugshots added any clarity and I would have preferred if your errata were overlayed on the video rather than cut to.
- On the subject of cuts, It was fairly noticeable when you cut. I was thinking about youtube videos I like, like VSauce or Numberphile and I realised that they probably cut a lot more than you do but for some reason it's less off-putting. I suspect that this is because they would cut to a different camera shot entirely. I think this complete change is possibly better than the subtle changes in the cuts in your video.
- It wasn't clear to me at the outset whether the intent of the video was to educate about a particular topic or to provide a novel opinion. Later in the video it became clear that it was the latter (I think) but towards the start it seemed more like the former.
With regard to the content:
- I'll start by saying I didn't really buy your argument. I thought you made a few fairly big assumptions which I would guess are incorrect.
-- The first assumption was that paying millions of dollars to CEOs improves the well being of other people. I think you could validly make an argument that companies should pay lower tax because of the positive effect that would have on employment but I think the number of people employed by the CEO personally would be fairly low. I wonder how many people were hired to work personally for Bill Gates (e.g. cleaners, drivers, etc) as opposed to by Microsoft. Even if we suppose that people hired directly by CEOs (or top earners in general) represent a large portion of the labour market I think it's invalid to assume that the amount they are paid in total is linearly proportional to the income of their employer. If Bill Gates doubles his salary does he hire twice as many drivers? If he halved his salary would he still hire a driver? If you took the half of his salary that he lost and gave it to someone else, would they hire a driver?
-- The second assumption was that the salaries of top earners have to be that high or they wouldn't do their job. The assumption here is that if you took away say 25% more of their income then it would no longer be worth their time to work. I suspect this is not the case though I clearly couldn't prove it.
-- The third assumption is that top earners make their money from employment rather than investment. Checking wikipedia, Bill Gate's net worth is a little under $80 billion. Say he invests $70 billion of that at a return of 5% per year. He would earn himself about $3.5 billion before tax. I am betting that this would dwarf the salary of any Microsoft employee including past and present CEOs. At that point the value he provided to microsoft becomes somewhat inconsequential. I believe the 'rich get richer' argument revolves around the exponential growth of wealth due to investment compared to the more steady growth in income.
-- Possibly the biggest assumption that you make is that the wealth gap is actually increasing. I don't think this assumption is crucial to your argument but you do explicitly state it in your video with an accompanying graph (which I liked). It wasn't clear what the source of the data in your graph was but I went ahead and compared the income of the top and bottom quintiles in 1980 and 2011 as best I could without having the original data in the graph. What I found was that in 1980, the top quintile earned about 3.6 times as much as the bottom quintile. In 2011 the top quintile earned... about 3.6 times as much as the bottom quintile. Effectively this means that everyone has become richer nominally but no one's purchasing power has really increased relative to anyone else's. I have ignored the complexities of distributions within quintiles but so does the graph. To me the graph was the most interesting thing but I thought it deserved more analysis in the video and had you done that analysis you might have picked a different graph
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I don't think there's anything wrong with making assumptions. Me disagreeing with some of your assumptions didn't prevent me enjoying your video. Some of your assumptions you do explicitly state. I guess I would prefer if prior to making a point you state the assumptions required for your point to be valid. Not sure if that's a common opinion or not.
Where do you live? I couldn't figure out whether your accent was South Africa or Australia.