I recently watched a two-hour discussion on the state of the UK economy on the Diary Of A CEO (DOAC) podcast with Gary Stevenson and Daniel Priestly.

Gary Stevenson was a successful currency derivatives trader in London. He now runs a growing YouTube channel called Gary’s Economics where he talks about wealth inequality and what he thinks we should do about it. He is persuasive, and his background as a trader gives him credibility in analysing macroeconomic trends. He famously predicted the asset boom caused by the UK furlough payments post-COVID. His basic and elegant argument went something like this: Government money was sent to workers who paid the money for rent and mortgage repayments to the rich, who stockpiled the money because they couldn’t spend it due to the lockdowns. Gary’s central message is that unless we implement a wealth tax immediately, the middle class will crater, and we will be left with over 99% of the population in poverty and over 1% of the population being ultra-rich.

Daniel Priestley grew up poor in Australia but is now based in the UK. He is a self-made entrepreneur whom I had not heard of before listening to this podcast. His message is entirely different: We live in a time of great opportunity in technology and media, and now is the best time in history to acquire wealth. He believes that the issue we face today is that big government has restricted people’s economic freedom, and that the government needs to lower taxes and reduce regulations for the middle class to thrive. He believes that if we raise taxes and try to tax the ultra-wealthy aggressively, they will leave the UK, and the rest of the country will be left to pay the tax bill.

These are two polar opposite perspectives, and watching their two worldviews collide was fascinating. I’d encourage you to watch the full podcast, as they covered a lot of material, and it touched many of the central debates that I see people having today about what to do about the UK economic situation.

Gary spoke about the dangers of encouraging people to bet on themselves and take personal responsibility for their situation. Indeed, he warns of the mental health effects of people concluding that they must not be working hard enough or smart enough and that they are to blame for their situation. Instead, he encourages people in difficult economic situations to blame the system.

Daniel counters that countless people in dire economic situations can use their self-agency to improve their situation. He also makes the point that the thing that gives people mental health issues is a lack of self-agency and self-belief that one can improve their situation. He pointed out that this is the dangerous mindset Gary’s message encourages. Daniel points out that almost all wealthy families lose their wealth over three generations. He also points out that implicit in Gary’s message is that “Gary can make it out, but no one else can”, which implies an arrogance.

In many ways, Gary is right here. People can be born in challenging financial conditions that are not easy to escape from, and to expect them to be able to escape from it is an unfair expectation. However, blaming the system should not encourage anyone to escape such a situation and instead sows resentment across class boundaries, eventually sparking revolutions and crime.

Gary did not engage with the point about how remarkably uncommon it is for families to maintain generational wealth, which undermines his central point that wealth accrues naturally to people who have any sort of wealth at all. Gary comes from an impoverished background, as he says himself. So I don’t think he fully appreciates this point. He just sees seemingly risk-free 5% returns do the back-of-the-envelope math. He assumes that the ultra-wealthy will remain ultra-wealthy forever, while forgetting the living expenses, taxes, divorces, afflictions, gambling addictions, and everything else that is well-known to eat away at wealth. I see many Marxist and socialist origins in Gary’s ideas, which is deeply ironic, being a self-made millionaire trader.

Likewise, Daniel didn’t reasonably address Gary’s concern that not everybody can be a self-made entrepreneur and run YouTube channels or digital businesses. Gary is talking about nurses, teachers, policemen, and the countless other sectors outside of entrepreneurship, who are being disrupted by technology rather than benefiting from it.

An insightful YouTube comment pointed out that Gary’s message focused on the collective, whereas Daniel’s message focused on the individual. This succinctly describes the underlying issue. The audience for Gary’s message is the government, and it is dangerous for the individual because it promotes learned helplessness. The audience for Daniel’s message is individuals, and it is dangerous for governments to hear because it suggests that entrepreneurs can fix these issues themselves.