Comment on Gary Stevenson: 'Tax wealth or we'll return to the feudal age'
gtrcoi@programming.dev 2 days ago
This man is a clown and can safely be ignored without negatively affecting any part of your life.
It’s a parody that this charlatan is making bank shilling populism to a magazine that is sold on the street by the homeless.
Listen to this self-aggrandising spiv winge about the “academics in their ivory tower” and how he’s so smart that none of them take him seriously, while making a career out of surface level platitudes like the title. It’s wild that anyone can listen to him without cringing out of their skull.
hark@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Apparently the hosts of that video you shared don’t like graphs either because they covered the most critical part of the graph with their dumb grinning faces: Image
Gary has a point, there can be endless playing about with numbers, and looking at a single graph is not enough to draw a vast conclusion. How about we look at a stat from the same page that graph was pulled from?
Image
and that stat highlights the point Gary was trying to make about looking at the wealth of the top 0.1% who are largely the ones taking wealth from everyone else, including from the rest of the top 10%. The host trying to pull a gotcha on Gary can’t even read the graph he handpicked because he said that things are better now than in 1980 before trying to correct himself by saying “they’re kind of like they were in 1980” even though actually the share of wealth for the top 10% was lower in 1980 and the share of wealth for the bottom 50% was higher.
On top of all that, the numbers end at 2020, which is right before plundering frenzy that the wealthy did thanks to all the money printing that took place during the pandemic. Here’s the page with graphs and stats for anyone interested: …org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
gtrcoi@programming.dev 11 hours ago
You’re framing of that video is complete rubbish. The hosts repeatedly state that they agree there are problems with economic equality, and accurately describe the problem at every point. Their point isn’t about the stats, it’s about how Gary is a grifter that tailors his message to attract simpletons who like shiney words and empty rhetoric. That he can’t even engage with a chart that might support his message because actual data isn’t a part of the equation for him, only rhetoric and whatever cherry picked headlines he can find to support it.
You’re also just framing this as a gotcha for the same reasons, that Gary is constantly playing victim, so his fans carry that message as well. He wasn’t a victim, he’s a grown ass man that can’t handle any push back without crying like a little bitch.
You complain about a graph not being enough to draw a conclusion then point to an even worse data point that completely misses 49.999% of the population in its analysis. That’s some turbo charged populist brainrot, and Gary will definitely add it to his grab bag of factoids to dazzle his audience for year to come, like jingling keys in front of babies.
hark@lemmy.world 28 minutes ago
Those two hosts agree there are problems with economic inequality, so then what’s the point of the graph? Is the graph showing there isn’t an inequality problem? If so, doesn’t that mean the hosts themselves are dismissing the graph?
druk@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
I think you’re missing the main point a little bit, the problem with Gary is that he oversimplifies everything. He bigs himself up as this decisive voice without actually engaging with inequality research and policy holistically, consistently. He is not an exceptionally good economist, however he has vast reach and a large social media presence. The problems arising from this sort of populism is less apparent while his mission is aligned with what one believes, but is concerning nonetheless. He is just a burnt out millionaire turned influencer/media figure, who larps as this down-to-earth campaigner for good, while building his youtube brand and selling a book about how he was the tippy-top trader at Citibank.
hark@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
When you want your message to reach the masses, you have to oversimplify, otherwise it gets bogged down in details that ultimately may not even matter. People are having trouble with basic cost of living: shelter, healthcare, education, and even food. Focusing so heavily on numbers and graphs is how you get clowns claiming that it’s just a “vibecession” just because some dumb metric like GDP or their arbitrary basket of goods looks fine, meanwhile these people can’t afford the basics.
The problem is that the field of economics is biased so heavily towards policies that benefit the rich because that is how you get funding. Economists are largely in servitude to the rich and that is why they consider an effective tax on the rich “bad economics”. What these past decades have clearly shown that catering to the rich does not work. Why do you think they’re so vehemently against a wealth tax? If it was so ineffective then they wouldn’t care about a wealth tax getting established.