Transcription
Hello. Welcome to Barry's Economics. I have a question for you. Have you ever heard of a cargo cult?
During the Second World War, the American Army used the islands of the South Pacific to refuel. And the islanders just couldn't understand it. They couldn't. They couldn't believe their eyes. And they watched the soldiers perform rituals, marching in formation, talking into radios. And then, one day, the cargo just started arriving from the sky. To the islanders, it looked like magic.
But then, the war ended. And the soldiers left. So, the islanders tried to bring the cargo back. They started walking in formation in the same way that the army did. Literally every single thing that they'd seen the soldiers do, they copied. Now, obviously, this didn't work. They imitated the rituals of prosperity without understanding any of its causes.
And and that's what we've done in modern economics. We've made a cargo cult of growth. The fastest growing economy in the G7. "Growth is the number one priority. Growth, growth, and growth." Everyone's still preaching growth, like it's the dominant mantra. It makes you wonder why. Like, why is that? Well, we saw that industrial expansion once made nations rich. So, we keep copying those rituals. More consumption, more production, higher GDP, as if the prosperity plane is just going to land any day now.
The reason the same thing isn't going to work [clears throat] is we don't live in the same land or time, because we've got nowhere else to grow out into. Economists are still worshipping the old idols of GDP growth. Basically, their policy is bamboo air strips. Like, they're just hoping the planes of prosperity will come back. Oh, please.
But the the cargo is not coming. I can't stress it enough. Like, it's already here. Like, and our job now is not to grow it, but to share it, to repair it, to sustain it. And that's the shift. The shift from cowboys chasing horizons to astronauts learning how to live together on one fragile ship with finite resources.
So, please, UK government, economists, stop praying to 19th century gods that no longer exist and use your power to redistribute the finite resources that are on our planet. Make the billionaires share. And the most efficient way to do that is a wealth tax. Do you want to bow on it? End.