The Gary Stevenson Phenomenon


By Dialogician

Recently, self-made east London trader Gary Stevenson has been making waves. His book, The Trading Game, has topped charts; meanwhile, he has been touring the UK carrying his ideas to wider audiences and sparring with millionaire adversaries.

In short, Stevenson is a straight-talking mathematical whizz-kid from a working class background who snatched a role at Citibank aged 21 via winning card game competitions and quickly became one of the world’s best traders. He quit Citibank a few years later and now runs a YouTube channel touching one million subscribers that focusses on how growing wealth inequality guarantees an ever-more impoverished future for the majority.

The simplicity of Stevenson’s prognosis as to the causes of growing inequality – relentless asset transfers to the very rich – belies the sophistication of his diagnosis as to how this major economic problem has been overlooked. Stevenson considers that the economics profession is immensely narrow-minded, failing to take inequality or distribution into account within its modelling and instead fixating on level playing field scenarios. Stevenson believes that an economics profession with a grasp of inequality and distribution might feed better ideas into political discourse around the genesis of ongoing poverty in seemingly wealthy societies.

There is surely much value in Stevenson’s prognosis overall. Inequality has been growing exponentially since the late 20th century when Bretton Woods institutions began to be broken down in favour of free market fundamentalism, allowing much greater sway for ‘wealth creators’ – read the ultra-rich – to move their capital and wealth around the globe uninhibited by controls or heavy taxes of any kind. An international economic system quickly developed in which more and more wealth accrued to fewer and fewer oligarchs while life – measured by real wages growth – barely improved for many, or sometimes, got worse.

Stevenson’s specific focus on ‘distribution’ is also welcome. Stevenson frequently makes the point that during COVID the state borrowed vast volumes of money to effectively pay ordinary workers’ wages via furlough – this money then funded workers’ bills, rent, and mortgages and ended up with asset owners – i.e. the very rich. The government engaged in an unprecedented wealth transfer to the already rich, exacerbating inequality between those who pay their way for a living and those who own substantial assets.

In other words, understanding how the pie is distributed is crucial in understanding the modern economy – and as the wealthy accrue more and more assets and working- and middle-classes are forced to spend more and more to subsist, purchasing power – disposable income – drops and eventually the middle class is wiped out. Stevenson considers that this trend is setting the UK on a trajectory towards the levels of inequality seen in India, Nigeria, and South Africa, among other countries.

Of course, the standard centrist refrain to this is that the ‘pie’ does not stay the same size but grows with wealth creation, comparative advantage, or some other textbook theory as to how economies work. Stevenson responds to this with a simple and accurate point: does it feel to the ordinary person like, as billionaires gets exponentially richer, so do we? Or just a bit – measurably? No.

The fact is, inequality is fundamentally and empirically tied to a host of modern social, economic, and environmental problems. Stevenson’s class-based analysis of how society is shifting is deeply refreshing in a media landscape replete with empty neoliberal jargon, and a political landscape beholden to wrongheaded fixations on GDP growth, ‘wealth creation’, and slashing the welfare state above all else.

Such virtual spaces as Stevenson’s YouTube channel create openings for wider discussions of the problems with gross inequality – beyond the specifics of the analysis itself. To me, the most obvious of these problems is that with a concentration of wealth comes a concentration of power. Is it really a coincidence that we now literally have billionaires running (and taking a chainsaw to) the US government?

As long ago as 2014, a comprehensive study from Princeton University demonstrated that the US had already grown into an oligarchy, rather than a democracy – two clearly incompatible systems. It stated:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In essence, wealth begets interest groups comprised of economic elites, and these interest groups come to influence government through a variety of channels before, apparently, they grow even bolder and enter government themselves. Trump, Musk & co are clearly of this ilk – ultra-rich businessmen now nakedly run the world’s most powerful state.

Stevenson’s point is that many Western countries are travelling in a similar economic direction and this is wrecking any prospects of democracy. Under any true form of democracy, ordinary citizens have sway in political decisions. In the US and increasingly the UK, ordinary citizens have very little sway over political decisions; the range of economic, social, and environmental options at elections are limited to a hair’s breadth difference in how quickly to travel in the same political direction.

This was not the case until very recently – Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn represented genuinely different political-economic options in which the systems generating wealth inequality would have been challenged. However, voices like this are being progressively drowned out. Oligarchy beckons.

I therefore view the emergence and growth of voices such as Stevenson’s, and spaces such as his YouTube channel, as very positive developments. The Left should not engage in internecine struggles about whether every aspect of his prognosis and diagnosis is correct but instead focus on the thrust of it. If I am correct, the thrust of Stevenson’s analysis is in favour of a more egalitarian society and brings to a much wider audience conversations about the pernicious effects of gross economic inequality.

Thoughts on Trumpism


By Dialogician

The world faces five more years of Donald Trump. What insights, if any, can be made from this moment?

Trump himself is an embodiment of an American brand of right-wing authoritarianism. German theorist Erich Fromm characterised such individuals as ‘authoritarian personalities’ who seek to rule, control, or restrain others, and more generally value submission to authority figures or to fixed hierarchies.

These figures, who can comprise up to 25% of any given population, exhibit an anti-intellectualism in the United States in particular. This is due to the latter’s political culture which is suspicious of learning. Consider the MAGA movement’s singular obsession with ‘wokeness’ whose chrysalis is supposedly the university. Trump garnered the most applause at his inauguration speech for a reference to ‘males’ and ‘females’ being inherently different – in supposed defiance of this ‘woke mind virus’ sweeping the West.

What Trump promises to reestablish – in his own mind and that of his fanatical fanbase – is, in fact, peace and order amid the storm. Right-wing activists fixated on the decline of ‘Western civilisation’ pin their anxieties on various perceived barbarians at the gates – woke professors, immigrants at the southern border, China in the Panama Canal, etc. Trump promises to quell these forces while raising America back to a standard of greatness.

Fromm wrote that the authoritarian personality ‘is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest’.

The conditions which brewed twentieth-century totalitarianisms may differ from those which nurture Trumpism today, but a common psychological phenomenon binds them. Trump and his ilk feel powerless at the prospect of a complex and multipolar global order; in its place, they hope to erect a more hierarchical – even imperial, structure. Consider Trump’s bizarre recent lurch into threatening Greenland, Canada, and other regions with annexation or invasion. There seems a genuine desire among these types to revive an imperial global order.

Can Trumpism itself actually make good on such a dystopian project? Unlikely – what we actually see is an American oligarchy as emboldened as ever before, certainly fearing the perceived barbarians at the gates – this is genuine, as per Fromm, not confected – but simultaneously quite excited about their own economic prospects. Barring some serious domestic or geopolitical debacle, Trump, Musk, and co. will govern as a kind of populist technocracy, mouthing slogans and perhaps introducing limited ‘populist’ policies – such as economic protectionism – while really acting to furnish their own pockets. For now, the phenomenon promises simply to postpone serious considerations of questions which ought to animate American politics – climate change, inequality – while rallying an at once submissive and aggressive base which has already attempted to overthrow United States democracy, and may do so again in five years’ time.