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Rory Stewart claims Gary is a "pseudo economist". Is he correct?
This is an AI-written (but human-edited) summary of Gary’s recent video: Have I been wrong on the economy this whole time?
Gary returned from six months of filming a Channel 4 documentary to find that the biggest piece of gossip in his absence had been generated by Rory Stewart, former Conservative MP and co-host of The Rest is Politics — the UK’s most-listened-to politics podcast.
In a November interview with Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Stewart had questioned Gary’s credibility as an economist, implying he lacked serious qualifications for the role. Gary came back and watched it. He found it interesting — not because it stung, but because it was so easily disproved.
During the interview, Stewart pressed Polanski on which economists were informing the Green Party’s positions on inequality and wealth taxes. When Polanski cited Gary as one of his intellectual influences, Stewart pushed back. He described Gary as a “city trader” who had studied “an undergraduate degree in economics” — and then asked, pointedly, where the people with graduate-level degrees were. Where were the professors? Where were the people for whom economics was their academic speciality?
We can stop growing wealth inequality.
The problem is Gary has a postgraduate degree from Oxford. He posted his certificate to Twitter within hours. And Stewart, for his part, has no postgraduate degree at all — while having accepted professorships at both Harvard and Yale.
Gary publicly received an apology. He had planned to leave it there.
While filming the documentary, Gary noticed a pattern forming. He was stopped outside the Treasury by a middle-aged man who identified himself as a Treasury official and told him — quietly, into his ear — that he was “completely economically illiterate.” He encountered it in interviews. He heard it from members of the so-called intellectual elite he was speaking to for the film. A new narrative was coalescing: Gary is not a real economist. Zack Polanski is not a real economist. Don’t listen to them.
That narrative, Gary argues, is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. And the Rory Stewart incident is its clearest expression.
To understand the attack, Gary walks through how economics actually works as a discipline and a career. It is a degree taken predominantly by people who want well-paid jobs, not by people who want to become academics. At the London School of Economics, where Gary studied, the vast majority of students came from wealthy backgrounds and were there to get into finance. The best-performing students competed for trading roles. When Gary graduated in 2008, the most prestigious and best-paid career an economics graduate could pursue was as a trader.
Academia is a different track entirely. To become a professor, you complete an undergraduate degree, then a master’s, then a PhD of three or more years, then postdoctoral work — often spending a decade or more in education and accumulating substantial debt, all while earning far less than you would in the City. Gary was a millionaire at 25 and a multi-millionaire at 26. There is simply no comparison between the two financial outcomes.
The question Rory Stewart raised — is Gary a real economist? — therefore reduces to a much simpler one: should only the academic track count? Gary’s answer is that the best-paid 10,000 people in the world doing economics day to day are almost certainly traders.
He illustrates it with an analogy. Cristiano Ronaldo gives his opinion on football. Someone asks whether he has a PhD in the sport. The question is absurd. Economics, Gary argues, is similar: the majority of people who are very good at it pursue it in the field, not in universities.
The particular frustration Gary expresses is about consistency. If Rory Stewart believes that professional experience without a postgraduate degree is insufficient to comment on a field, he must return the money from his Harvard and Yale professorships — both of which were given to him on the basis of his practical experience in government, with no postgraduate qualification to his name.
You cannot, Gary argues, accept the legitimacy of experience-based expertise for yourself while denying it to others. Either experience counts, or it doesn’t. Stewart has already decided it counts — for him.
Beyond the personal, Gary turns to what he sees as the more substantive part of the attack: the suggestion that economists do not, in fact, have a consensus around wealth taxes and inequality, and therefore these ideas should be treated with scepticism.
Gary grants this is partially true. He has said so from the beginning. If there were a broad academic consensus that inequality was driving falling living standards and that wealth taxes were necessary to fix it, he would not have started the channel. He started it precisely because that consensus was absent — and he believed the absence was causing serious harm to millions of people.
But absence of consensus, Gary argues, is not the same as absence of evidence or absence of expert opinion. Thomas Piketty, one of the most decorated economists in the world, has dedicated his career to inequality. Gabriel Zucman, winner of the French Economic Association’s dissertation prize, has spent years documenting the mechanics of wealth concentration and arguing for wealth taxes. These are not fringe figures. To suggest that “no serious economists” support these ideas is, Gary says, simply wrong.
Gary also raises something rarely discussed in these credential debates: predictive accuracy. Economics is not a physical science. You cannot run controlled experiments. What you can do is observe who predicted correctly and who did not.
In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, the mainstream economic consensus predicted a rapid recovery. It did not come. Year after year, from 2008 to 2020, forecasters anticipated that interest rates would rise and living standards would improve. Neither happened. Gary, operating from his framework that growing inequality was suppressing demand and keeping rates permanently low, predicted the opposite — and made millions from it.
When COVID came, the mainstream — after twelve years of wrongly predicting recovery — finally concluded that rates would stay near zero forever. Within months, rates went to 6%.
Gary’s argument is not that he is infallible. It is that when a field consistently makes the same mistakes in the same direction for over a decade, scientific honesty demands an examination of what the model is missing. His answer has always been the same: the missing variable is inequality and its effects on the distribution of wealth and spending power.
Rory Stewart’s position — as Gary reads it — is that this question should not be asked unless it is asked by someone with the right credentials. That, Gary argues, is not scepticism. It is gatekeeping.
Gary does not shy away from the structural argument. Academic economics, he explains, is disproportionately staffed by people from wealthy backgrounds — not because they are more talented, but because they are the ones who can afford to forgo City salaries for the long road to a professorship. Someone like Gary, top of his class at the LSE and from a working-class background, could not realistically have chosen that path. A flat in London was already half a million pounds. Academia would have meant a choice between intellectual ambition and financial survival.
The consequence is that the academic economists who sit at the top of the field — the ones whose consensus Stewart invokes — are, disproportionately, people whose families were doing well before they arrived. They have not, on the whole, experienced falling living standards. Their incentive to acknowledge that inequality is the central problem of our time is structurally limited. If the problem is inequality, their expertise is irrelevant to solving it.
This is why Gary calls Stewart’s position not just wrong but circular: the only people allowed to certify that change is needed are the people who benefit from things staying the same.
Gary’s response is twofold. He is reaching out to the academics who do support this analysis — Piketty, Zucman, Saez — to appear on the channel and demonstrate that serious, credentialed economists share these concerns. An interview with Gabriel Zucman has been confirmed.
But he is equally firm that the movement should not allow itself to be hemmed in by the argument that academic consensus is a prerequisite for action. The consensus has been wrong for twenty years. Living standards have fallen. The public has noticed. The political parties that defended the status quo are collapsing in the polls across Europe and beyond.
The centre is dying. The future, Gary says, is there to be won.