Thank you. Thank you Jason for inviting this Jason.
And of course the clicker would be good to have.
But thank you. Thank you for also inviting me into your life experience.
It's been a long time since I spent Zhongqiu Jie with friends in Taiwan.
So it's very exciting for me.
And I apologize for speaking in English, even though Chinese is my mother tongue.
But I'm more comfortable speaking in English , since I've been living in the state for the last 28 years.
So many of you with no doubt have heard that the occupy Wall Street movemen.
Know about the 99% vs the 1%.
At the very ugly core of it. The conversation has become "You vs Me"
I'm very concerned.
Partly that conversation has risked of developing into a French Revolution like outcome.
Where the poor really doesn't have nothing to eat but the rich.
I'm also concerned for very self-serving reason. I'm part of that 1%.
I'm a business owner. I worked in the finance industry.
I actually teach finance to MBA students in the state who want to go work on Wall Street.
It pains me to know that what I do, what I make, what I've saved.
Things that I thought would be very attractive to girls and their parents.
These are now things that pit me against 99% of my fellow men.
When I thought about this. I thought maybe I can help reduce the tension.
Putting on my economist head, perhaps by helping people to understand...
that it's quite natural, even desirable in a market-based economy to have income and wealth inequality.
If I could help people understand that. Maybe I could bridge the gap between the 99% and that 1%.
Putting together in a presentation, my friends came to me and he told me...
"How dare you! Someone who represents the finance fat cat think that you have any right to justify or rationalize income inequality!"
"Everything you say is buy and sell serving!"
And I panic. What I thought could have been my 15 minutes of TED fame could easily turn into a live time of internet infamy.
What am I going to do?
So it's my plan. I come to you today not posing as an economist with deep understanding that economic inequality.
Not offering a solution. In fact I have no interest in even judging inequality to be bad.
Instead I invite you to conversation with me to explore this topic with different perspective.
So, let's take a look at the very basic statistic about inequality.
It's absolutely true that top 20% owns about 93% of all financial wealth.
When you look at the statistic. You can't help yourself sympathize with the sum of poor have nothing to eat but the rich.
But then, when you look on the consumption side. The bottom 80%, despite having only 7% of the assets, actually consume about 70% of total output.
If we take a look on the income side.
What you would see is a fairly familiar story.
The top 20% of the higher earner makes about 15 times more than the bottom 20%.
But yet their consumption is roughly about twice as high.
So the enormous gap on income side doesn't quite fully translate in the consumption differences.
Of course, all of us know that income inequality has grown quite a bite over time.
Roughly by about 10% per annum over last many decades.
Again, puzzling enough, consumption differentials have not moved up by the same token.
So what's going on here?
Interesting enough.
Apparently the wealthy are so in love with money that they spend most of their time making more money instead of consuming.
So they're not actually crowding out goods and services from the rest of us.
But that's not really the point.
After all consumption is about what we buy.
An ultra high net worth might spend a quarter of million dollars to buy a Bentley.
The average household buys a Camry at 1/10 of the price.
I was told by the Birkin bag costs about a thousand times more than the average fashion bag.
I'm not a girl, but I don't think that makes you look a thousand times sexier.
For the men who chuckle in audience.
We men are the worst. This is the latest Breuget. It's about 10,000 times more expensive than a normal Timex.
And I can assure you that it doesn't make you 10,000 times a man.
But it doesn't about how much we spend.
At the end of the day it's about happiness.
It's about what we buy and we consume.
And oddly enough. The research shows that above certain level.
There's almost no difference in the happiness between he who has lots of money and he who's not.
That's interesting.
If it's not about happiness. If it's not about the consequence of income and wealth inequality .
Then I'm very confused as an economist.
I find it authentic when people say they do believe the wealthy are more happier and more purposeful.
And I don't think that it's the case that somehow the 1% has so exploited the system and taken everything.
So the mass is nothing but to eat the rich.
Then what is it?
As I take my head off as an economist and began to explore and feel this conversation as a human being.
I started to understand what is in our collective soul.
It's about unfairness.
It's not about what the income buys us.
It's actually about the income tells us.
About us and another men.
We no longer expect the capital market to assign prices to coordinate economy activities.
We actually have outsource to the market economy to set prices to the worth of human beings.
The price of a Birkin bag is no longer about supply and demand.
The price of a Birkin bag now tells you the worth of your life and the quality of your experience.
No wonder you're angry.
You're angry when you see the wage of school teachers significantly lower than the wage of bankers.
You're angry when you see a doctor being pay less than a plastic surgeon.
When you look deep inside, when you say that the wage of school teachers is too low, is unjust.
Do you really object to the supply and demand of school teachers?
Or say something more fundamental.
Is it that you finally realize hypocrisy.
Despite all that you say, deep down in your heart, you judge another man by the 0 in his bank account.
And despite everything you try, deep down inside you cling to the belief that more money is a better experience.
So you're sitting in those seats and you think naively that if I could only join a protest and give a school teacher a higher salary then I can give him a better life.
The high income earners are going to try their very best to convince you that they're smarter, they're better, they're mightier because they have a bigger picture.
But yet, it's us who dignify that shallow expression of a human experience by raging against their paychecks, products and Mercedes.
When you have chosen to engage in a battle field defined by dollars, you've already lost.
The market system actually needs you to believe that.
It needs you to believe that you lack, you're insufficient.
So that you'll punch in 10 hours a day and wake up to do it all over again tomorrow.
I can share with you, the example of John D. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller literally had more money than god himself.
But when he was asked "Mr. Rockefeller, what do you need to be happy?"
To which he responded "Just a little bit more."
You can choose to be that.
If so whether you are the rich or if you eat the rich.
You will not satisfy your hunger.
But there's a different way.
You can choose to believe that you have enough.
You have everything need to experience this human life, to be this wonderful amazing creature of possibilities.
Not defined by what you made, by what you spent, by what you have, but defined by who you are and what you are becoming each every day.
And when you choose that, it becomes possible for the each of us to relate each other.
Not from the 99% vs 1% but I say a whole complete 100%.
I'm Jason Hsu and I'm 100%.