Gary’s economics is a mental cancer for young people
And Zach Polanski
Imagine I sent you back in time to the merrie old England of Richard I. Your mission is to bring forward the Industrial Revolution by eight centuries. In your pack you carry the combined wisdom of the greats; Adam Smith, Keynes and Gregory Clark.
At first, you are an oddity - a foreigner with strange garb and incomprehensible speech, mistaken alternately for a prophet, a madman, or a sorcerer. But after months of immersion, mimicking the inflections and cadence of Early Middle English, you finally begin to converse intelligibly in the rough dialects of the local villeins, freemen, and guildsmen. You settle in a modest but lively market town, one of the few places with literate clergy.
You begin with the graphs. Supply and demand, plotted out on parchment with charcoal. The scribes are confused, but intrigued. The younger monks, educated in Latin and curious about divine order, entertain your strange numerology. The more worldly of the blacksmiths and tanners, proto-industrialists working in foundries start to grasp your talk of inputs, outputs and marginal returns.
You explain that the great wealth of the far future is not the result of piety or conquest, but capital accumulation, technological diffusion, and institutional reform. You sketch the foundational formula of modern macroeconomics C + I + G + (X - M) onto sheepskin. You illustrate compound interest by likening it to the slow growth of a sapling into a mighty oak.
A century before Wycliffe, you point out the opportunity cost of chantry-building and monastic land-hoarding. You propose that instead of building ever more altars to the dead, England should invest in mills, roads, and canals.
You introduce a primitive form of credit; an early tally system that the reeves and reeves’ sons can understand. You encourage the pooling of resources for agricultural improvement. You draft a blueprint for enclosure, arguing for greater productivity over the inefficiencies of the open-field system. You hint at legal reforms, limited liability partnerships, proto-corporations, the sanctity of contracts.
Then - one assembled notary suddenly interjects.
“But ser, we know already whereforth the famines and poverty comes from.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, ser. It is because of the Jews, and their perfidy.”
It would be much the same as the fruitless task of trying to explain to the average 20 something today some basic facts about their economic situation and the potential solutions for it. Of course, they recognise that they are poorer than their parents, and getting poorer by the year, but the average ‘normie’ twenty something essentially does not recognise the part that either supply or demand plays in their predicament, whether caused by a lack of new homes being built or immigration respectively.
Instead, the beginning and end of their problems is ascribed simply to ‘the rich’. The rich are buying all of the houses. The billionaires are buying all of the homes and just leaving them vacant for a laugh. It all started when Maggie Thatcher sold all of the Social Housing. Taxes are increasing to feed the growth of the pension funds? That’s because ‘the rich’ are not paying their fair share, and Rupert Murdoch wants you to blame the immigrants mate.
This kind of lazy, soft left, Russell Howard’s Good News style thinking is the standard worldview for people born between 1990 and 2000. It is another mark against the argument that ‘normies’ should be valorised. It is not acceptable to be this ignorant about the economic circumstances that are driving you to the point of infertility. It is an asinine, uninformed bigotry which makes it impossible for them to be organised as a group to advocate coherently for their own interests. All such socialism is the socialism of the fool.
The Dragon has already described, in one of his many revelatory articles, the ‘false consciousness’ that the average white under forty suffers from. I have little to add to this framing analysis, being interested instead in how and where these ideas about the world percolate. Who is spreading the blood libels about ‘The Rich’. Well, look no further:
The character played by Gary’s Economics is a recurrent one within British politics, at one time it was Russell Brand, before that Owen Jones. The takedowns of him are well worn, the Financial Times has suggested that he is lying about his record at Citibank (which he uses to claim credibility on economics). He reminds me a lot of Lawrence Newport, our man from nowhere, he has a tendency to talk about ‘the movement’ he is building as if he is the Messiah with none of the charm or self-effacing wit which makes boasting palatable.
Like Newport, I also find his apparent influence deeply perturbing. Gary’s Economics has achieved household name status with the average ‘Toddball’, a catchall term for the beige corduroy shirt and Ralph Lauren cap wearing millennial, a creature of 2019, see Oli Dugmore from Politics Joe (below) as an example. This is a genuine political constituency in Britain and I’m not just spitefully making up sociological categories based on people I knew at University.
This popularity can be part explained by the extreme simplicity of his message. Many of Gary’s videos are twenty minutes in length, or even longer, and are often pitched as explainers, but they are in fact just reiterations of the same point over and over again. “The rich are taking the money, the middle classes are poorer, the poor are poorer, it’s not your fault.” The evil Troika is why the Greek people cannnot retire at 45. It is an intoxicating message insofar as it is simple and the solution to it seems so simple, using the State to redistribute the money away. “The rich have taken all the money”.