Gary’s Economics: I Made Millions Betting You Would Stay Poor…
I don’t have any time for Rory or Alastair Campbell but this is worth watching as they interact with Gary Stevenson and his analysis in disbelief:
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“Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.” And politics has its alternative scoring system. Obviously social cheating thrives in both dynastic commerce and electoral politics.
But surely we have some case studies where the value of money crashes or disintegrates, thinking of phase shifts in complex systems or other discontinuities. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
Economics is not my strong suit, but I was surprised that Gary Stevenson didn’t mention military spending/arms trading, soft power culture and digitisation when discussing the USAmerican economy in particular, which is not only inflated by financialisation and parasitism off global communism and the US Dollar’s reserve currency status, but because of other levers of coercion or (current) status within international organisations. Or to put it another way, why are the super-rich building end-times fortresses on private islands unless they foresee the bubble bursting?
Another economist who doesn’t mention the natural world, which is a bit worrying, and conflated wealth with riches (but to be fair offers a reasonable challenge to the ideology behind that confusion).
I grasp it fine. Have done for what seems a very long time.
The world I live in needs a complete re-set, huge radical change, a revolution…whatever you want to call it.
Meanwhile, the redistribution of wealth needs for folk at ALL levels in that game to see that wealth is taxed, certainly no less than, relatively speaking, the tax that the ordinary working, basic tax payer pays. And IMO the wealthy folk need to be paying much more on their wealth.
I think the incredulity and patronising response from Rory Stewart was telling
Completely agree.
Campbell and Stewart can’t help themselves. They lean on their public profiles.
A Campbell seems to line-up with the view that his previous high profile with Blair entitles that pally superciliousness that is sooo irritating.
R Stewart seems to believe that because some pundits laid him out as an intelligent voice for Toryism and history (FFS!) he can do the pretendy Lord of intellectual superiority.
G Stevenson? Haven’t made my mind up yet. But some of it makes sense.
There are a number of very serious questions to be asked about Mr Stevenson and his knowledge of gov’ economics. I will leave it to Richard Murphy to show that, frankly, Stevenson does not know what he is talking about. Stevenson still thinks (like the tories & LINO) that gov’s function from an economics PoV like a corner shop. They don’t, they never have.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/08/07/my-concerns-about-gary-stevensons-economics-of-wealth/
A wealth tax has great appeal but in practice they will be very difficult to apply. If one’s wealth in land, farms, businesses etc, not easily realisable assets, do you have family trusts that will be difficult to raid. In NZ the IRD performed a survey of the wealthiest 50 families in NZ. I think ten responded in a satisfactory way. It was revealed their average tax rate (annual on income) was less than 10% overall. You must known in NZ there is no income tax free allowance, you pay 12.5% on the very first dollar you earn. So the person earning the minimum wage pays tax at a higher rate than multibillionaires. The rich don’t just get rich by earning lots of money, but making sure they never lose any to the society in which they live. The wealth of the top 10% in NZ is almost all protected in tax avoiding trusts and amounts to nearly a quarter of trillion dollars, which is several times total NZ government debt. Of course, too in NZ, there is no capital gains tax or inheritance tax in NZ, so most of the money accumulated by the wealthy comes into their pockets totally tax free, and firmly stays there. NZ used to be considered an egalitarian society, perhaps 50 years ago, but now that’s just a joke. Still, a wealth tax has found its time, I’m sure.
I enjoyed this interview. I respected the three of them, including Rory, they all contributed I thought in an honest and respectful manner, whoever you agreed or disagreed with. It’s how argument and dissent should be managed. The discussion of modern masculinity and its brutality was fascinating. We live in an economy with no social mobility. That has long been understood as a brake on the progress of any society.
I think though a little bit of humility from all of them might have been welcome. Such as saying “I only know my things, if we are to deal to the converging crises of our and the world’s society we need to assemble a massive cooperative intellectual exercise” I have long suggested that we urgently need a new ecological enlightenment and that isn’t the work of a few self selected movers and shakers all wearing their own seriously limiting intellectual blinkers. No one human being possesses sufficient intelligence or knowledge to accomplish this. Rory’s summing up was realistic, a wealth tax is no magic bullet, but I didn’t get the impression that Gary thought that either, so that was not a useful observation . And I didn’t know who Gary Stevenson was.