This Is Why The Rich Get Richer

If you look back across history, you find that inequality is the norm. After the second world war that changed, and there was a period of rising equality across the west. But rising inequality is back, unless we do something about it.

UNDERSTAND, SHARE & PUSH BACK

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Performed by Gary Stevenson
@garyseconomics

[Pollycat]

Hi Gary. I have your book and I mentioned it to my brother. He went to a book shop during a lunch break, read a few pages and then bought it. He’s going to start watching your videos once he’s finished it. Hope awareness about this issue continues to sky rocket. 😊

[TheDoosh]

The problem is, Dave the accountant on £60k believes he is part of the elite wealthy family group and should vote accordingly, not realising he is as poor as the rest of us. They've divided us well.

[tomato]

Gary, I’m an analyst, mediocre Python dev, graphic designer, film maker, photographer, and animator. I absolute love your channel. It gives me hope that I had lost having this argument with colleagues over the years and seeing the country decline as predicted.

I am personally financially stable and have time, passionate belief that this is a necessary fight, and useful skills. If there is any way to get involved and help out, please let me know. If you need numbers crunching, websites building, motion graphics, footage, help to organise, or just donations, I want to pitch in so much. I’m sure there are others out here who feel the same.

[anna_lovecrystalhealing]

I think also the problem is that the rich and powerful have told the rest of us that we’ve got no power of our own and we’ve just believed them and let them do what they’ve always done. I don’t think anything will get better unless we non-rich and powerful realise that no one else has power over us and that we can make things better for ourselves individually and as a collective, but we have to choose to do it - and actually put in the work. Only then can we decrease the wealth and power of the rich and powerful and make society more equal. I’m definitely pushing back with you, Gary, and trying to help ‘ordinary’ people see that they have the power to do this too and create better conditions for all of us. It’ll take time but we’ll get there! Thanks for your awesome videos, I’m learning so much 😀

[pierremartini]

Interestingly, the IMF has recently called on governments to tackle inequality if they want to see growth in future. How governments respond is of course a moot point. Love your videos.

[HShango]

You're on point Gary. The ultra rich need to bee taxed at a higher rate, not the middle class/upper middle class or the working class/poor.

[mattwest]

Incredible result with the book ranking #1 on the bestseller list 🎉

[Jay...]

I was working for a top sales manager with IBM in the 1980's when Thatcher cut tax bigtime on the rich. He was in the top tax bracket at the time. All of a sudden, within a few years, all his 3 children had nice big houses, cars, everything a young person could want. They were still at university. He couldn't believe his luck.

[SCOTTDisick-ycx]

A rich life which gives you a little bit of time and work-life balance costs you financial independence because it'll be low paying. Tough choices to make. Keep in mind, investing provides a jumpstart to financial freedom. At 34, I already have a $6m portfolio.

[JohnJohnson-mqve]

Anarchist theory (following native American thought) has always recognised that money is not the issue, it's the ability to transform wealth into power

[chetro]

It’s almost like building millions of affordable houses, investing in public services and protecting workers rights whilst taxing the rich a sensible amount is good for ordinary people and the real economy🤪

[Cheebasonic]

Up until the 80s the level of executive pay was many times less too! A head of a FTSE company was paid 8 times that of an average worker in 1980 …now many get multiples of over 100 x or more . If average pay multiples had stayed linked in same way …then average salaries would be over £250k a year …to justify a CEO getting over £2 million +++

[markbacon]

these videos are all great. they help to explain the difference between "real economics" and what is talked about in the media

[fat_biker]

I think at the end of WW2, millions of trained soldiers were coming home from war & wanting to see some improvements in their future prospects as a result of seeing their mates being blown to bits in a vast catastrophic war against Fascist regimes that had arisen directly as a result of economic inequality, involving a Soviet Union that had literally been formed off the back of bread riots - so again, economic inequality, & the wealthy had on balance done spectacularly badly from inequality & the consequences of inequality, in the 'up against the wall' sense, or indeed the attempting to profit from the wrong side & having all theor wealth destroyed or confiscated sense. A generation of people returning from the war to the US & UK were uniquely vulnerable to the idea that they deserved better & that if 'they' told them to return to serfdom & bear all the costs of WW2 so that the great & the good could carry on like it was the 1920s again, it would all very much kick off in a way that couldn't be stopped, & the left was on the march all across europe, which had been liberated from fascism at enormous cost, . I reckon the political leaders & the wealthy industrialists who had survived the war realised in 1945 that returning to the pre-war economic settlement would likely have seen them being hung with piano wire from lamp posts in the streets in front of their mansions at some point, since the soviet propaganda machine would have been pushing at an open door. So the whole Bretton Woods settlement was devised to make sure wealth was spread around & everybody got richer, & it turns out that when everybody can do more than scratch together enough food & shelter to survive, you get incredible economic growth...

Fast forward to the 1970s, it all went wrong, capital strike, Reaganomics/Thatcherism was the old feudal economy reasserting itself, & here we are...

[terencemichaels]

Well said as always....tax the mega-rich or face disaster.

[cosmosnomad]

I would consider changing narrative in a couple of places. You talk about the kids of the rich buying your house and your kids not having a house. I'd frame it as your kids having to pay rent to the kids of the rich. I think that highlights the propagation of this system (think proof by induction). How it maintains itself and worsens inequality. You also talk about spending most of your pay on rent, etc. I'd phrase that more as rich people pay you then you hand most of it straight back to another group of rich people, which again highlights how little of what ordinary people makes stays in their own pockets and how much stays in the pockets of the rich. There's probably more to be said around this concept.

In a sense, you could say the economy is just a bunch of rich people using the poor as pawns in their fight between each other to suck money not only from the poor but also from other rich people. Which is very successful for residential property owners due to its necessity and less successful for diamond companies because people will prioritise a home over diamonds

[morturn]

Gary, as always, another super video that explains your ideas in an easy to understand way. I imagine that there can never really be a truly equally society, but I we could work to reduce it, so everyone has a fair and reasonable quality of life. A lot of us don’t really need a lot to have this either.

The problem I see is that it took two world wars and over a 100 million deaths to being about the improved levels of equality that we enjoyed throughout the 60’s and 70’. The wealthy were then more than willing to pay a fair share of tax then that helped to rebuild our society.

How we get a progressive tax system in place now without another world changing event is going to be challenging, but at least having people on the side of the consumer is a good start.

Thanks again for all you do, it’s much appreciated.

[TheLastSongbird]

Love your stuff :)
Totally agree. Born into the slums & poverty of a northern England
industrial city in 1950, I was one of the 'fortunates' to live my 73 years
in that 'golden period', having had a beautiful life in Australia for most
of my time. In 1980 I stopped watching TV & reading newspapers as
I increasingly understood what was happening both in the unseen
background of that time and to us working class people. That being
the fact that the availability of 'more work, money & goodies' changed us.
We became conditioned by the advertisers etc to believe 'happiness'
meant having more of everything, just like the rich! But, that pretty much
changed the shared common life values we had been brought up on,
putting us into a world we did not understand nor knew how to navigate.
I believe this period and its experiences, literally destroyed those 'old values'
and therefore the communities & individuals that onced lived by them?
Add in more recent times of the online worlds we now frequent, the high
levels of immigration (that eventually dilute the culture) creates an
environment & sociopolitical atmosphere of division, self interest, hatred,
anger etc, GB in 2024 basically.
There is no solution to this. Today is the outcome of a period of changes
no one could have foreseen and understood the ramifications of. The only
pragmatic and rational solution would be as you say, to limit those
enormous economic disparities from existing, but, it's too late!
Those atop the pyramid now, not only determine how economics
unfolds but they also learned how to corrupt/own/manipulate every
facet of so called democracies (govts, civil service, national infrastructures,
police, education, law, local govt etc etc etc). The pyramid sitters not
only own all the money they own pretty much every facet of contemporary
'civilization'! There needs to be one mother of a global collapse that 'may'
allow for a rebuild that could perhaps, rebuild using those old values
and structures of common sense etc :)
There seems to a serious collapse of the global economic systems
coming, but will it be enough?

[ronniechambers]

Great Vlog, as usual. Whilst I agree on the need for the rich to pay more tax, in order to have a less unequal society, I also think you need to mention the role the Trades Union Movement played in that 70 years you speak of, when inequality narrowed, I think 1974 or 1975 was the year when the income gap between rich and poor was at its narrowest. I believe the period between the 1830s and 1870s was one where the standards of living remained stagnant over a 40/50 year period, I feel we are 15 years into a similar period, unless of course we fight back. The Trades Unions and the subsequent Labour Party that followed gave ordinary people the power to determine their own destiny, without relying solely on the rich paying high taxes, and paternalism, which at the time was only offered to those who didn't rock the boat. Its no coincidence that the demise of unions and subsequently the demise of the Labour Party, that is now the party of choice for neo-liberals, looking after big business rather than the working class, that standards of living have fallen. For example, after the war, The Labour Party and the influence the unions had within it, were responsible for Nationalisation of the major industries, and the building of millions of council houses and the demolition of slum housing, the NHS and the benefit system. All these things helped narrow inequality, and you can see why inequality is now widening, the same thing is happening in reverse, no council houses being built, many people now having to rent, and privatisation of the major industries and the NHS. Its basically the battle between Capital and Labour, the re-distribution of wealth, the rich have always held the upper hand, apart from that period between the end of the war and Thatcher, when the poor took back some of the wealth previously denied them, narrowing inequality, improving lives, and better standards of living. The rich are now taking it all back, without a whimper from the working class. If we don't fight back, we will end up in the same dire situation our forebears had to endure before WW2. We still have a lot to lose, pensions, benefits, NHS, rights and laws put there by generally Labour governments to protect us. If we have to start from scratch like our forefathers did in the 1800s, it will be painful as it was for them, death by hanging, deportation, jail and blacklisting, you may think think I am exaggerating, but the rich elite will not stop, given the chance they will take everything back they think is rightfully theirs, a private school education teaches them that they are the chosen ones, better than you, and that the working class are basically dogshit, I'm sure you Gary heard as much said when you worked in the City of London. Think of the recent Extremism bill getting pushed through Parliament recently under the guise of the so called threat of Islamic terrorism, its not, its to make terrorists of those who dare to fight back, its a re-run of history, what happened to and after the Tolpuddle Martyrs. People who speak out and or advocate civil unrest will be sent to jail, mark my words. The Dystopian future is here.

[andrewwiltshire]

Hi Gary, I think it's refreshing to hear your perspective on how to heal division and inequality within society.The conundrum is that " One shoe does not fit all ", alternatively too much freedom results in unfettered and unregulated competition in markets We have all encountered "There was just so much choice, I could not decide what I wanted." Earlier this morning I heard Theo Paphitis say "Don't tax me more, I can do so much more good than give the money to the government."
You mentioned taxing the rich more results in better public housing then why were so high rise apartments built during the sixties later demolished because of poor building practices.
Life is just so full of anomalies it is difficult knowing where to nail your flag.What is true today may not be the same tomorrow.
All we can do is ensure and maintain opportunities for all with access to education, information, health,legal representation, housing with positive political direction and leadership for the greater good.