A new trailblazing economist is going after the right-wing playbook and calling it out whenever he sees it.
The man in question is Gary Stevenson, an ‘Inequality Economist. Former Trader. Other Economists make predictions, but my ones are actually right,’ as his X bio reads.
Stevenson’s is an incredible story. He was born in Ilford in east London: “I grew up in a tiny little bedroom. I had one drawer under my bed with everything I owned in it. I’m not good at owning shit, I’m not good at decorating shit, I’m good at talking about economics.” He is expelled from grammar school, gets into LSE anyway, wins an internship at Citibank on a card game, gets a job, becomes the most profitable trader at the bank in 2011, is a multimillionaire by his mid-20s, has a mighty clash with the bank and then a breakdown but walks away the winner anyway. None of that is a spoiler for his book, I don’t think, because the real drama is what’s happening to the economy.
“I pitched this book to Penguin in 2022,” he says, “and said to them, ‘If you think the economy is bad now, wait until this book comes out. Politics and economics are increasingly gonna be everything people care about, because this gets worse. The world’s falling apart, and it’s not gonna get better.'”
Lose out
While billionaires manufacture division between left and right, Stevenson insists the real conflict is top-down. “At the end of the day, 90 per cent of us are going to lose out economically. The economy is our common ground. I know it can be difficult when you’re getting these things that you’re very passionate about thrown at you, but if we cannot find common ground to protect each other’s interests on the economy, we’re going to lose our fucking houses.” Does he think things can get better? He pauses. “I work really hard at this, and the growth in my channel is just unbelievably rapid. That has to be a source of hope. You’ve read my book. I’ve not got a long history of losing. I don’t want to lose this one, and I’m going to try my best to win.”
Videos
Dale Vince shared one of his videos and wrote: “Focus more on hating immigrants and less on taxing the mega rich – it’s the MAGA playbook. @garyseconomics is spot on here. Immigrants are not our enemy…”
He is another one about the rich making money from compound interest.
Another calls out the wealth divide, he says: “The rich are growing their wealth very rapidly, and it’s acting like a black hole in society.”
He tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy how the rich grow their wealth through passive income and investments, while ordinary people fall into debt, and argues that low interest rates, tax policies, and government responses to crises like 2008 and COVID-19 have mainly benefited the wealthy, deepening the financial divide. And finally, he urges people to educate themselves and push for change before inequality spirals further out of control.
He also says that 18t century Europe is not a good benchmark for our living standards.
Related: Watch: Faiza Shaheen blasts government’s ‘money for war, not the poor’ plan
