Handing Gary Stevenson The Microphone

Watch this.

The man is Gary Stevenson, a former Citi trader who walked away from the desk, wrote The Trading Game, and now runs Garys Economics on YouTube. The video is thirty-nine minutes on why The Economist hates wealth taxes. I would not normally hand my readers a thirty-nine minute video. Watch this one.

Stevenson does, on the economic-intellectual apparatus, exactly what these pages have been doing on the political-constitutional apparatus. He takes the stated position of the captured intellectual class — wealth taxes bad, inheritance taxes acceptable — and he runs the math on it. The math reveals that for the only people the wealth tax targets, the wealth tax and the inheritance tax are the same instrument applied at different intervals. The position the credentialed economic class has staked out is, on its own arithmetic, not an argument. It is a performance of intellectual seriousness covering for a structural commitment to the inheritocracy the same class spends its other paragraphs claiming to oppose.

This is the Sarah Isgur move, performed in a different register on a different apparatus. The same shape. The same sincerity. The same operative-class signature in which the specific question is converted into a general structural claim that has no answer. We are against inequality, but we cannot do the only thing that would address it. The conversion is the work the position exists to perform.

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What Stevenson has, that almost no American writer in the comparable register has managed to acquire, is the authority of having sat inside the apparatus he is now describing. He traded the relevant instruments. He knows what the numbers do. He knows what the wealth dynamics produce because he was, for several years, one of the people producing them. The credential is uncounterable. The captured intellectual class can dismiss academics for being academic and activists for being activist and politicians for being political. They have not yet figured out how to dismiss a former star trader who simply will not stop running the math in public.

The video is also a master class in something I have been thinking about for a while, which is the question of how a person communicates a structural argument to an audience that has been trained to dismiss structural arguments as the resentment of the losers. Stevenson’s answer is to refuse the framing entirely. He does not appeal to fairness. He does not appeal to morality. He appeals to your own asset position. He says, to his middle-class viewer, if you do not tax the very rich, they will own everything, and you will own nothing, and your kids will own nothing, and the math is the math. The argument is delivered in the register of self-interest properly understood. It is the Tocquevillian register of the long view, the recognition that one’s own welfare is structurally entangled with the welfare of a class one would otherwise be tempted to look down on. Stevenson is doing in the economic domain what these pages have been trying to do in the political-constitutional domain. The diagnostic axes are complementary. The voices are complementary. The work is the same work.

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I want to flag two specific moments in the video that I think are the load-bearing ones.

The first is the lifecycle-savings reframe. Stevenson notes that ordinary people accumulate wealth through their working lives and then disaccumulate it through retirement and end-of-life care, so that the wealth they hold at death is much smaller than the wealth they held at peak. The inheritance tax, applied to ordinary people, mostly catches nothing because there is nothing left to catch. But the very rich, whose wealth derives from asset returns rather than wages, accumulate continuously and pass everything to their heirs. For them the wealth tax and the inheritance tax are mathematically identical taxes applied at different intervals. The intellectual class’s preference for the latter over the former is therefore not a substantive preference at all. It is a preference for the version that is politically harder to enact, conducted by people who claim to want the substantive outcome the easier version would deliver.

This is the cleanest demonstration of legal formalism as political ideology, applied to economics, that I have seen in any popular venue. It is the diagnostic the publication has been making across Economic Royalists, Business Ought Never Be Politics, and The Sovereign Individual Was The Blueprint, rendered in arithmetic that no honest reader can refute. The Economist’s position is exposed not as wrong but as not-an-argument. The position is the position. The exposure is the work.

The second is the closing arc — first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win — which Stevenson applies to his own trajectory and to the trajectory of the wealth-tax argument in Anglophone politics. The relevant fact about the closing arc is not the sentiment. The relevant fact is that The Economist devoting two pages of its cover package to fighting wealth taxes is itself the documentary evidence that the apparatus has moved from laughing to fighting. The apparatus does not waste its prestige on fights it does not have to have. The apparatus is having this fight because the apparatus has noticed that the argument is winning. Stevenson is right to read the fight as evidence of his own position’s strength. The captured intellectual class is now visibly straining against the argument, and the strain is exposing what the class is actually for.

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You should watch the video. You should send it to anyone you know who reads The Economist and treats it as serious analysis rather than as the house organ of the inheritocracy. You should consider, if you have not, whether the credentialed intellectual class you have been deferring to on questions of economic policy is the appropriate authority on the question of whether the structural conditions of your own family’s life are sustainable. The answer is increasingly clearly no. The voice that is willing to say so, in arithmetic that survives scrutiny, is Stevenson’s. There are very few like him. Watch the video.

That is all I came to say.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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