Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where the guy threatens to kill himself to enact change, and the elites give him a primetime tv show where he does that for a living.
I'm in an odd position because my view of this article mirrors your view of Gary's video(s) - I agree with most points but my disagreements are profound enough to render a strong response necessary.
Even if I accept everything you say about the guy as true (I do), his central thesis and modus operandi for his channel/book/TV persona is a trifecta of: wealth inequality is rapidly increasing, it can be mitigated via some form of wealth tax and the labour party has been co-opted by the interests of capital so they won't impose wealth taxes unless politically pressured to. The channel/book/tv persona exists in order to garner sufficient support for this singular goal and I treat everything the man's doing as a realpolitik way of bringing him closer to achieving it. So unless the goal of your article is just to tell us not to buy into his persona in the way that he appears to have done at times, where exactly is the insight here?
Gary is an interesting figure for me because he's an example of the status quo being made self aware, to an extent - the people already made wealthy by the existing system probably ought to just stop jostling for more money and influence and help the current system not fall apart completely; he is more or less explicit about this (albeit in a fairly inarcticulate way) when talking to and trying to convince fellow wealthy people of why this issue should matter to them. I suspect he can't be fully articulate about this because it would damage his 'working class hero' appeal he is cultivating to garner support from his cause by exposing his motivation as being essentially self-serving. But that's fine, unless you're an accelerationist who wants the system to fall apart completely and to replace it with something else entirely. That's a valid viewpoint too, so long as you have sufficient sway over the people with guns to build the system you want in the ruins of the old one.
To summarize my point, if the man can use these Machiavellian methods to achieve some form of wealth tax while Labour is still in power, does it really matter how he does it?
My view is his methods don't lead to effective change, they lead to followers. He sees getting himself in the media as a bigger win than it is. This hurts the cause.
Stevenson said that before he started the YT channel he tried working in think tanks/reaching out to politicians and hit a brick wall. Now that he has a following through playing the attention economy game well, he can reach people actually making fiscal decisions in the UK.
Imo his appearance on The Rest Is Politics happened because he's appealing to that show’s target audience - not the Guardian reading-PMC class but actual people in Westminster, some of whom (e.g Torsten Bell), Stevenson knows personally. So in this case, him having followers was a pre-requisite to him getting access to the actual people making the decisions.
Whether that's sufficient for him to influence them towards effective change right now remains to be seen but as the next election draws closer he can use the following as a cudgel to bludgeon Labour politicians seeking re-election into backing wealth taxes or having his platform be used to funnel disaffected labour voters into either the Greens or the new left party Corbyn is cooking up. So having a following doesn't automatically cause change to happen but it gives him leverage where he would otherwise have none. On balance, I'd say this helps the cause a hell of a lot more than it hurts it unless the man starts drinking his own Kool-Aid really hard between now and 2028.
The "controlled opposition" that gets exactly the "salience" he discusses is a standard totalitarian strategy of power. Pitting him as the antithesis of Reform immigration policy is really fisting by Clausewitz - what better way to handle working class discontent then split them into opposing factions.
There is a general phrase of a mental framework that I end up using quite often, and it applies here as far as the limitations of his "message": that the problems he discusses require a General Equilibrium, rather than a Partial Equilibrium, analysis.
A substantial wealth tax while doing nothing else will just cause the rich to flee the country and tax revenues to decrease. And I'm all in for Georgism as a general principle.
Rather, as you suggest, wealth inequality and the patterns of immigration are both epiphenomena of more systemic macroeconomic dysfunction. I think William Baumol provides the best understanding of the modern western stagnation in median incomes, but others may prefer other systematic analyses.
It's important to also note that Gary's central insisted policy is also disconnected from real working class interests. Musa Al-Gharbi observes that the progressive elite's obsession with redistribution is far from the priorities of the working class, and in a cynical moment one can claim deliberately so because they are the ones administrating the redistribution and taking a cut in turn. The working class actually wants predistribution - inherently high value added and high wage jobs. An economy with most working class jobs being servants in various ways for the upper class is still not going to be satisfactory to the general population just because after tax+transfers income gets a bump up.
As an illustration of the diverse forms of epiphenomenon, as an applied mathematician, I'd prefer that too. I didn't care about politics for a long time until more recently I got frustrated that, for instance, there's hardly any funding for research into development of automated industrial machinery while there's plenty for making sure LLMs are polite. And if it weren't for the underlying systemic factors, a political economy with the former prioritized would of course be one that employs many technicians and machinists at high wages (due to high marginal productivity). A political economy that prioritizes LLM politeness on the other hand just influences the activity of David Graeber's BullshitJobs. Hence why "you see AI everywhere except in the productivity statistics."
Reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where the guy threatens to kill himself to enact change, and the elites give him a primetime tv show where he does that for a living.
strangely i don't remember this one, i shall investigate
It's like the second or third episode of the original first season, before Netflix bought the show.
I'm in an odd position because my view of this article mirrors your view of Gary's video(s) - I agree with most points but my disagreements are profound enough to render a strong response necessary.
Even if I accept everything you say about the guy as true (I do), his central thesis and modus operandi for his channel/book/TV persona is a trifecta of: wealth inequality is rapidly increasing, it can be mitigated via some form of wealth tax and the labour party has been co-opted by the interests of capital so they won't impose wealth taxes unless politically pressured to. The channel/book/tv persona exists in order to garner sufficient support for this singular goal and I treat everything the man's doing as a realpolitik way of bringing him closer to achieving it. So unless the goal of your article is just to tell us not to buy into his persona in the way that he appears to have done at times, where exactly is the insight here?
Gary is an interesting figure for me because he's an example of the status quo being made self aware, to an extent - the people already made wealthy by the existing system probably ought to just stop jostling for more money and influence and help the current system not fall apart completely; he is more or less explicit about this (albeit in a fairly inarcticulate way) when talking to and trying to convince fellow wealthy people of why this issue should matter to them. I suspect he can't be fully articulate about this because it would damage his 'working class hero' appeal he is cultivating to garner support from his cause by exposing his motivation as being essentially self-serving. But that's fine, unless you're an accelerationist who wants the system to fall apart completely and to replace it with something else entirely. That's a valid viewpoint too, so long as you have sufficient sway over the people with guns to build the system you want in the ruins of the old one.
To summarize my point, if the man can use these Machiavellian methods to achieve some form of wealth tax while Labour is still in power, does it really matter how he does it?
My view is his methods don't lead to effective change, they lead to followers. He sees getting himself in the media as a bigger win than it is. This hurts the cause.
Stevenson said that before he started the YT channel he tried working in think tanks/reaching out to politicians and hit a brick wall. Now that he has a following through playing the attention economy game well, he can reach people actually making fiscal decisions in the UK.
Imo his appearance on The Rest Is Politics happened because he's appealing to that show’s target audience - not the Guardian reading-PMC class but actual people in Westminster, some of whom (e.g Torsten Bell), Stevenson knows personally. So in this case, him having followers was a pre-requisite to him getting access to the actual people making the decisions.
Whether that's sufficient for him to influence them towards effective change right now remains to be seen but as the next election draws closer he can use the following as a cudgel to bludgeon Labour politicians seeking re-election into backing wealth taxes or having his platform be used to funnel disaffected labour voters into either the Greens or the new left party Corbyn is cooking up. So having a following doesn't automatically cause change to happen but it gives him leverage where he would otherwise have none. On balance, I'd say this helps the cause a hell of a lot more than it hurts it unless the man starts drinking his own Kool-Aid really hard between now and 2028.
The "controlled opposition" that gets exactly the "salience" he discusses is a standard totalitarian strategy of power. Pitting him as the antithesis of Reform immigration policy is really fisting by Clausewitz - what better way to handle working class discontent then split them into opposing factions.
There is a general phrase of a mental framework that I end up using quite often, and it applies here as far as the limitations of his "message": that the problems he discusses require a General Equilibrium, rather than a Partial Equilibrium, analysis.
A substantial wealth tax while doing nothing else will just cause the rich to flee the country and tax revenues to decrease. And I'm all in for Georgism as a general principle.
Rather, as you suggest, wealth inequality and the patterns of immigration are both epiphenomena of more systemic macroeconomic dysfunction. I think William Baumol provides the best understanding of the modern western stagnation in median incomes, but others may prefer other systematic analyses.
It's important to also note that Gary's central insisted policy is also disconnected from real working class interests. Musa Al-Gharbi observes that the progressive elite's obsession with redistribution is far from the priorities of the working class, and in a cynical moment one can claim deliberately so because they are the ones administrating the redistribution and taking a cut in turn. The working class actually wants predistribution - inherently high value added and high wage jobs. An economy with most working class jobs being servants in various ways for the upper class is still not going to be satisfactory to the general population just because after tax+transfers income gets a bump up.
As an illustration of the diverse forms of epiphenomenon, as an applied mathematician, I'd prefer that too. I didn't care about politics for a long time until more recently I got frustrated that, for instance, there's hardly any funding for research into development of automated industrial machinery while there's plenty for making sure LLMs are polite. And if it weren't for the underlying systemic factors, a political economy with the former prioritized would of course be one that employs many technicians and machinists at high wages (due to high marginal productivity). A political economy that prioritizes LLM politeness on the other hand just influences the activity of David Graeber's BullshitJobs. Hence why "you see AI everywhere except in the productivity statistics."