I met Gary in 2016, however briefly. We were staying in the same Guangzhou hostel, and ended up getting a meal together at a nearby Uyghur restaurant with what I remember to be excellent, affordable food, but a massive roach problem. The latter was common in China, and one learns to ignore it.
I very specifically remember our conversation, which was one of those young persons’ “I know how to save the world” yarns. I specifically remember that Gary knew how to fix the economy, althought the ensuing decade has eroded the exact details of the conversation. In short: Tax the rich – they aren’t paying their fair share. He was an economist by training, and I was some asshat with a semiotics degree and no real prospect for the future. I am not sure how I contributed to the conversation, and I doubt I did it in any kind of memorable way. However, the conversation stuck in my mind, and not to long later I shot an email to a freind, as we an economist, about Gary’s ideas. Said friend wasn’t impressed, and pointed out that taxing the rich is suprisingly difficult, especially because they can squirrel their money away in very expensive assets and then claim to be untaxably broke. Tax liquid wealth and all the rich go out to buy a Picasso or two.
(It may be of interest to the anecdote that I was and am a rigorous journaler. But as I was leaving China, I was a bit overburdened and decided to ship some of belongings home. Some of these things were stolen by the good people of the People’s Republic, and among the theft were three years worth of journals).
I don’t think I remembered Gary’s name, but our conversation stuck with me for years. At some point, the algorithm suggested me a video on a YouTube channel called ‘Gary’s Economics’. From the thumbnail alone, I reocgnized the face. The accent as well immediately told me it was the same person as my Guangzhou encounter. I found his contact and shot him an email. Gary had indeed been traveling Asia at that time.
None of that should matter to this review. It might help to understand that I do on principle agree with this person’s points about the economy. I think he has the right idea.
So why did this random guy I encountered in China write a book, and what is it about?
It’s not a great book. The rag to riches story is, alas, nothing new. But the whole time I was reading this, someting was ringing in my head. It was the same feeling I got when I read Confessions of an Economic Hitman some 20 years ago, a ‘non-fiction’ book that was composed entirely of bullshit the author made up and no one had the balls to fact check. I have no way of even knowing how to prove it, but I somehow doubt Gary Stevenson was ever ‘the best trader in the world’. I also doubt that at uni they had to develop a special test to hoodwink him into an impossible task, just like in that one star trek movie. I had doubts throughout, and I will not bother to list them all. There were also moments where I didn’t, but the truth of the matter is those instances I had my opinions set in place from before I read this. He paints financiers as a group of people to set in their ways and culture to really understand how the real world – and more troubling, the real world economy – actually funtions. But I am in my 40s, and I have seen how the last few economic crashes have taken place, and how our governments failed to inact any meaningful legislation to combat the banks from enriching themselves through a crisis.
Does the fictionalization I suspect here detract from his arguements about the economy? I have no idea, but objectively I would say no. But for the book itself, I would say it is not worth reading. The prose isn’t great either.
Early on in the reading, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. The book was smelled of ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’, a book of complete and utter bullshit that was very popular in the early 2000’s. But that book struck me as being liberal conspiracy theory bait. This one I can’t really fathom why it is as I found it.
Failures in Polymathy 