Barry's Economics

One of the most powerful beliefs in modern politics isn't a policy. It's the belief that nothing can change. You hear it everywhere and I feel it too. Most of us do. But the strange thing is that when researchers study how change actually happens, they keep finding the opposite. Social change rarely arrives because everybody suddenly agrees. It often begins with surprisingly small groups o...

Jurrasic Park is about AIAI is Jurassic ParkJurassic Park is a great film about what happens when humans build things before thinking about the consequences. A lesson we can learn from, in particular, with the current fastest technological development in human history - AI.This week's video touches on research on our inability to underprice distant threats, to the way our brains struggle to un...

Steven Bartlett replied to my clip about Diary of a CEO. At half past midnight. Edited. Do you know Steven Bartlett? Not know of him. Know him? Most of us feel like we do. We know his voice, the lean-forward, the frown before he disagrees. And we've never met him. This video is about why our brains can't tell the difference, and what that same wiring does to a man that 50 million people ar...

What if Voldemort isn't actually the main villain of Harry Potter? What if he's a symptom rather than the actual problem - a symptom of something truly sinister (I'm not saying that Voldemort isn't sinister btw)This week's video draws on research into how radicalisation develops across the world, alongside Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's research on Why Nations Fail. An...

Life's a Meritocracy, right? We like to think meritocracy rewards the people who are most talented, driven and capable. But what happens when the very things you're told will help you get ahead can actually work against you? In this second part of the meritocracy series, I look at the "hustle penalty" and the hidden costs of how you present yourself when you're trying to move...

Why do we work? The obvious answer is:Because we have to. But what if that's only part of the story? This week's video looks at the biggest lie you've been told about your own motivation, scarcity, UBI experiments and the rather uncomfortable possibility that if we looked at the studies and acted on them we come.... become more powerful than we could possibly imagine. It might give us...

The real Tragedy of the Titanic Wasn't The Iceberg. This week's video is what we get wrong about tragedies. This is a story about who gets killed, what power does to us, and how to change course so the when disaster hits - it doesn't need to be a tragedy. I’m Barry Ferns – a comedian whose personal journey through failure, homelessness, and rebuilding led me to explore the socio and be...

This video is about why immigration is always the argument. Not whether the arguments are right. But why that particular argument, and not wages, or land, or who owns what, is the one that keeps being handed to you. I go through the neuroscience, the leaked internal documents, the 2.7 million posts study, and the numbers on what people believe about immigration versus what is actually happening ar...

I've been a comedian since I was 15 and in that time I've watched some of the most talented people of my generation become household names. And I've also watched some of the most talented people of my generation disappear completely. Not because they weren't good enough or because they didn't work hard enough. Because talent and recognition are two completely different things....

Why Doesn't It Seem Possible to Tax The Rich Even a Little Bit More? Well...There's a trick that's been used against the public for over seventy years. It's completely legal, it's very well funded, and it's working on you right now. It doesn't involve lying. That's the clever part. You never have to say anything false. I want to show you how this trick works, and yo...

This is the final part of my conversation with Gary Stevenson, recorded before his documentary came out, and it's the most personal of the three episodes. We talk about why meritocracy is a myth, why success is mostly survivorship bias, and why Gary treats fame and politics as a game (his words, not mine, and he's honest about what that's covering for). He also breaks down Jeff Bezos&#...

Part 2 of my Conversation with Gary Stevenson - the economist who quit a trading job that made him millions and has spent the years since campaigning for a wealth tax, and this week his documentary "How to Get Filthy Rich" aired on Channel 4, Wednesday 8th July at 9pm. Gary came in for a two and a half hour conversation, and this is the second of three episodes we've cut from it. &qu...

Gary Stevenson quit a trading job that made him millions and has spent the years since campaigning for a wealth tax, and this week his documentary "How to Get Filthy Rich" airs on Channel 4, Wednesday 8th July at 9pm. Gary came in for a two and a half hour conversation, and this is the first of three episodes we've cut from it. We talk about the billionaire he interviewed who's n...

Why do poorer people love Period Dramas like Downton Abbey, that adore the very Privileged aristocracies that kept their great-grandparents in poverty? Why do we worship Billionaires despite their clear exploitative behaviours? This is the psychology of how shows about the British class system became comfort viewing for the people it should enrage. And how we fall in love with the Myths of the Sup...

Everyone is still trying to take Nigel Farage down... and every attack makes himstronger. Here's the uncomfortable truth: If you attack him: he's already won, and almost nobody hasnoticed why. Farage isn't the disease. He's the symptom. In this video I show that the entire Political strategy of beating him has failed for decades because he isn't competing in the market for poli...

In 1762, the Earl of Sandwich asked for meat between two slices of bread. Did he invent the Sandwich? Maybe Not - As People had been doing this for centuries. But he had power, prestige, and profile, so he got to "name" it. Economics works exactly the same way."Job Creators." "GDP growth." "Trickle-down." These aren't neutral terms but are the stories wr...

For seventy years, the world barely made zombie films. Then, right around the turn of the century, that changed, and we haven't stopped since. The biggest Franchises of all time: The Walking Dead. The Last of Us. Game of Thrones. World War Z. 28 Days Later. Why now? Why all at once? This isn't a video about horror - it's why millions of people, with no coordination between them, starte...

Filmed in front of over 20 original Banksy works across London and Bristol. This is a video about what Banksy keeps showing us, how he actually works, and why (after all this time) he's still relevant and properly revolutionary. And the answer isn't actually "because his prints sell for a lot." In fact it's almost the opposite of that. Most people know Banksy as a street arti...

Elon Musk. Tesla. Spacex. Cybertrucks. Solar Power... not your normal supervillain origin story. But the neuroscience explains everything. Do you remember when we all kind of liked Elon Musk? Electric cars. Space travel. Solar panels. He felt like the closest thing we had to a real-life Tony Stark. And now he's... this. Nobody's asking the right question. Not "what did he do?" bu...

The Wealth Tax Debate Rages OnBack and ForthUp and DownBut what does it miss? And Why Is It Always so Circular and Never Ending? I’m Barry Ferns, a comedian whose personal journey through failure, homelessness, and rebuilding led me to explore the socio and behavioural economics of inequality. This channel digs into how systems of power shape our identity, behaviour, and beliefs, and how we can sh...

This is the only comedian in the world who has actually changed tax law. (as far as I know)Not highlighted it - Changed it. With jokes, a mahogany buffet, and a few hundred letters from members of the public. On Barry's Economics, we spend a lot of time talking about what needs to change; inequality, taxation, who owns what, who decides what. Mark Thomas spent decades actually doing it. This c...

Every Political and Economic debate about poverty and inequality goes the same way. Left says redistribute. Right says grow grow grow. Round and round. Why is it so endlessly circular - and why does nothing ever actually get fixed? One reason could be that there's an entire category of evidence that never makes it into the roomWe account for bias in medicine, law, and aviation. We just don&#39...

We often treat extremely wealthy individuals as if they have a deeper understanding of how the world works. But there is a structural reason to question that assumption. As wealth increases, people become less exposed to many of the constraints and trade-offs that shape everyday life. Research in behavioural science suggests that people rely heavily on their own experience when forming judgments....

Everyone has a take on the manosphere. This isn't one of them. Because the debate you've been watching - the one about men, women, masculinity, feminism, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson - isn't actually about any of those things. It's about something else entirely. Something far more boring and far more profitable. The science on this is extraordinary. And nobody is talking about it....

You live in the wealthiest civilisation in human history. And yet - it's not enough, right? That's not a character flaw. It's the system working exactly as designed. This video is about what happens when the right answer becomes the wrong one. And why the neuroscience, the psychology, and the data all say the same thing: beyond a certain point, growth stops converting into wellbeing. T...