I'm Gary Stevenson former trader and people's economist this is Gary's Economics

today we're going to talk about what the economy would look like if we fix wealth inequality

okay if you watched my videos so far you could be forgiven for coming away a little bit depressed right

i made my money by betting that the economy would be broken forever that is going to get worse

i've explained in my other videos that if we don't do anything about wealth inequality

it's going to get worse and worse and worse housing affordability is going to get worse

ordinary people won't be able to afford houses wages will stagnate and it'll be difficult to get a good job

so i get a lot of *messages* from people saying look i like your videos but they're making me feel

bad about the future and um i don't want to do that so i want to explain is

this idea that wealth inequality is killing the economy it makes some bad predictions if we don't do

anything about wealth inequality but what it also does is open up the possibility that if we do

do something and we do change wealth inequality we can make this economy work so much better

for ordinary working people and families

now imagine a different possibility... imagine if rather than the rich owning all of the wealth in our society

and the rest of us having to pay them to use it imagine if the wealth was more equally distributed

so we all owned a little bit of the property and also the corporations and the land this would mean that

instead of ordinary working people paying a big chunk of their salaries to the rich every month

we will be paying those salaries to each other and we'd also be receiving it from each other

this would mean we would all have a passive income every month that we could use to fund our lives

but not only that if the money instead of going to the super rich is going to ordinary people

well we know that ordinary people spend the money that they get as opposed to the rich who save it

that means that instead of the money going up to the rich to buy our houses

it will go between ordinary people who will then spend it again to drive each other's wages

instead of that negative spiral of ordinary people getting poorer and house prices going up

you'd have a positive spiral of money going in between ordinary people driving wages up every time it goes around

now that may sound unrealistic but it's happened before

in the 20 years after the second world war in the 50s&60s when we had much higher taxes on the very rich

housing was much much more affordable for ordinary people you could buy a house for two to three times average income

that was 50 years ago before the internet if we were to have a much more equal distribution now

housing could be so much more affordable wages could be so much higher

and we could have so many more options in how we live our lives

most importantly security would be much more affordable for ordinary people and families

100 years ago there was an economist called John Maynard Keynes

he's one of my favorite historical economists British of course like all the best economists

and he said about 100 years ago that he expected his grandchildren would only work for 15 hours a week

obviously you'll see now that if you try and work for 15 hours a week you're probably going

to struggle to feed your family so why was Keynes wrong? Keynes' idea was over the next 100 years

technology would improve massively that would mean that we could produce the same amount of

goods and services with much much less work he thought that would mean that wages would go up

and up and up and ordinary people could afford to work less and less and live better lives

why hasn't that happened well some economists will tell you the reason that has happened is because

people simply want more stuff so they can't work 15 hours a week because they want more stuff

i mean those economists like most economists probably come from rich families because

if you don't come from a rich family and you try working for 15 hours a week

you'll probably realize you ain't going to get much stuff at all for that

so we can understand why Keynes was wrong if we understand the cases in which Keynes was right

because there are some people in this society who don't even have to work 15 hour weeks

if you watch my last video 'what is wealth?' you will have seen that Jeff Bezos even if he doesn't work at all

will make $6billion a year and very wealthy families that have wealth of say £50million

they don't have to work at all and they can make £1-2million income every year

so what we have created is a society where 95% of us have to work long hours just to get by

4.9% of us don't have to work and can still live and 0.1% of us get millions of pounds a year

even if they don't get out of bed so Keynes was right we could all live working 15 hours a week

but instead we've chosen to give all the money to this small group of super wealthy families

while the rest of us have to fight to get them to pay our salaries

so look that is the key message here right if you have a very wealth unequal society

even if you have great technology all of that technology as well as all of the land on the property

is going to be owned by the super rich the super rich don't like to spend a lot of money

so we all need jobs but all the wealth is owned by super rich people

who have machines to do the work for them and we need to convince them to spend money on us

if that's what we do then it is inevitable wages will be low and housing will be unaffordable

but the key message is it does not have to be that way

when i talk about reducing wealth inequality it's not just about making society fairer

it's about making the economy work for ordinary people if we were to do that

wages could be massively higher houses could be massively more affordable

and we could live Keynes' dream of being able to work 15 hours a week

but it doesn't just have to be working 15 hours a week

it would massively increase the options available to ordinary families you know

maybe you do want to work a 100 hour week but if you work a 100 hour week you'll be able to

get rich and you'll be able to live a life of luxury and if you want to work fewer hours

you can spend more time with your family more time with your kids you could spend more time

pursuing your hobbies you could spend more time making videos about wealth inequality on youtube

these would be options available to ordinary people rather than simply working

all the hours of the day just to take care of your family

Look, my overarching message here is things dont have to be this way

if we don't do anything things are going to get worse wages will fall

houses will become more unaffordable our kids lives will be worse than our lives

ordinary people's finances will be insecure

we will live lives where we don't know whether our kids will be able to have financial security or not

but if we do something about wealth inequality it's not simply about making this world fairer

it could massively transform the economy and the lives of our kids

it could give them the freedom to pursue their passions the freedom to make money the freedom to become rich

the freedom to have nice houses the freedom to have secure families

This is the potential future we could have if we fix wealth inequality

so when i make my videos and i make my pessimistic predictions

that is what will happen only if we don't do anything but if we do something if we fix wealth inequality

that future of wealth and security for everyone could be there for us

but it's only going to happen if we make it happen and if you want to help me do that

make sure to watch the next video 'how we're going to make the economy change'

at the moment these guys are profiting from a crisis that's going to keep our economy in a slump for 50 years

there is one other thing they can do with that mass amount of income

they can buy your mum's house