Work hard. Develop your skills. Present yourself well. Keep pushing.

Eventually, the people who are good enough will rise.

It’s a comforting idea because it makes success feel deserved and failure feel explainable.

But there’s a strange problem with it.

What happens when the things we’re told will help us succeed can actually change how other people judge us?

This week’s video is the second part of my series looking at meritocracy. The first looked at survivorship bias and why studying successful people tells us far less about success than we think.

This one looks at something slightly more uncomfortable.

The hidden rules.

Watch Here:

Luisa Omielan was the starting point for this series. She’s now developing a show about Mary Magdalene and asking what the world might look like if the Bible had been translated by women.

It’s a self-financed project, supported by individuals through her Patreon, and she’s also developing a book club on YouTube.

You can follow what she’s doing here: https://patreon.com/luisaomielan

Thanks for tuning in and I’d love to hear your thoughts on the latest video.

Barry

They see the people who made it yet they don’t see the hundreds of brilliant comedians who were just as funny, just as original, just as hard-working, but never quite caught the right break at the right moment.

This week’s video began with a simple question to the incredible comedian, James Acaster.

“Who is the most influential comedian people have never heard of?”

His answer was Luisa Omielan.

That conversation eventually led me to Abraham Wald, who helped the Allies rethink how they protected aircraft during the Second World War by paying attention to the planes that didn’t return.

It led me to Daniel Kahneman’s work on how we build stories from incomplete evidence.

And it led me to a much bigger question.

If we only ever hear from the winners, how much can they really teach us about success?

This is the first in a series exploring meritocracy.

Not to argue that talent doesn’t matter.

It does.

But perhaps we’ve become too quick to confuse talent with visibility, and recognition with worth.

🎥 New Video

🎭 Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that the 5th August show has now sold out, which is amazing.

We’ve added one final performance on Sunday 16th August, so if you’ve been thinking of coming along, that’s now your chance: https://dice.fm/event/l8kwxr-barrys-economics-live-16th-aug-the-bill-murray-london-tickets

It’s a mix of stand-up, economics and psychology, and I’d love to see a few of you there.

As always, thank you for reading, watching and sharing the work. It really does make more difference than you probably realise.

Barry

It doesn’t require fake statistics or elaborate conspiracies.

It simply requires making change feel dangerous.

For decades, the evidence linking smoking to serious illness continued to grow. Scientists published study after study. Doctors warned about the dangers. Eventually, evidence emerged showing that second-hand smoke harmed other people too.

Yet Britain didn’t ban smoking in enclosed public spaces until 2007.

The interesting question isn’t when the evidence appeared.

It’s why the evidence wasn’t enough.

The answer wasn’t simply politics. It was psychology.

If you can persuade enough people that acting would be reckless, premature or economically damaging, you don’t need to win the argument forever. You only need to postpone it.

That strategy has appeared again and again throughout history.

Which is why debates around taxing extreme wealth often feel strangely familiar.

The details change.

The language changes.

The underlying mechanism rarely does.

This week’s video explores how that psychological trick works, why it’s so effective, and why history suggests it can eventually be overcome.

Because one of the comforting things about the smoking story is that the delay wasn’t permanent.

Eventually, enough people understood what was happening.

And everything changed.

🎭 Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that there’s now one remaining Barry’s Economics Live show this summer.

The original 5th August show has sold out, so we’ve added one final performance:

📅 Saturday 16th August: https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

If you’d like to come along, I’d love to see you there.

As always, thank you for reading, watching and helping these ideas travel further than I could ever manage on my own.

Barry

We love the story of the lone genius. The entrepreneur who built it all from nothing. The comedian who “made it.” The self-made billionaire. They’re tidy stories. They make the world feel fair.

But they also leave something out.

Every success story is surrounded by invisible people. Teachers. Friends. Parents. Colleagues. Editors. Audiences. Luck. Timing. Someone who opened a door. Someone who took a chance. Someone who shared your work when nobody knew your name.

We mostly notice the person standing on the podium. We rarely notice the hundreds of people holding it up.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed this final conversation with Gary Stevenson so much.

We ended up talking about meritocracy, survivorship bias and why success so often gets mistaken for individual brilliance when it’s really the result of countless invisible factors working together.

I also surprised Gary by presenting him with my 100,000 subscriber play button.

It was a genuinely moving moment because this channel probably wouldn’t exist in its current form without Gary mentioning it earlier this year. Thousands of you arrived because of that recommendation. Since then, you’ve shared videos, left comments, challenged ideas, supported the Patreon and introduced the channel to friends and family.

That’s community.

It’s also why I don’t really believe anyone succeeds alone.

The conversation also wanders into politics, Jeff Bezos, wealth taxes, art, Disco Elysium, working-class representation and why Gary thinks more ordinary people should simply start making things instead of waiting for permission.

If you’ve ever thought, “I’d love to contribute, but I’m not an expert,” I hope this episode nudges you in the opposite direction.

Nobody starts as an expert.

🎭 Barry’s Economics Live

A huge thank you to everyone who’s already booked tickets. The 5th August show has now sold out, which is both slightly terrifying and incredibly exciting.

Because of that, we’ve added one final date:

📅 Saturday 16th August: https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

If you’ve been thinking about coming along, this is now the only chance to catch the show.

It’s a mix of stand-up comedy, economics and psychology, looking at why the world works the way it does, and more importantly, how we might change it.

I’d love to see a few of you there.

As always, thank you for reading, watching and sharing the work. This channel has grown because people keep passing the ideas on, and I never take that for granted.

Barry

He wasn’t studying the economy from a textbook.

He was inside it.

And after years of making millions, he came to a conclusion that completely changed his perspective:

The way we talk about wealth is often missing the bigger picture.

We tend to explain success through individual choices.

Work harder.
Make better decisions.
Take more risks.

But economies aren’t just collections of individuals.

They’re systems.

And systems create incentives.

In Part 2 of my conversation with Gary, we explore why people who own assets often experience the economy very differently from people who rely mainly on wages.

We discuss:

• Why wealth can compound over time

• How asset ownership changes your relationship with inflation

• Why inequality isn’t simply explained by effort or talent

• The arguments behind Gary’s support for a wealth tax

The important question isn’t whether people should be rewarded for success.

It’s whether the rules of the game are creating the outcomes we want.

A quick reminder that the live show returns next month, and thanks to your support we’ve now added a second date.

📍 5 August

📍 16 August (additional show)

It’s an evening of stand-up comedy, behavioural economics and the stories behind the videos. If you’d like to come along, it’d be great to see you there.

Watch Part 2 of my conversation with Gary Stevenson here:

Live show tickets:

https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

Long before Barry’s Economics existed, Gary was one of the people who made me think differently about inequality. Not because I agreed with everything he said, but because he was asking questions that very few people in economics seemed interested in asking.

Questions like: Who benefits? Who pays the price? And what happens to a society when wealth concentrates faster than opportunity?

So when Gary agreed to come on the channel for what became a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, it felt a little surreal.

The first part of that conversation came out yesterday.

What struck me most wasn’t actually the discussion about markets or trading. It was something much broader.

At one point, Gary describes cynicism as a tax on ordinary people.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that sentence.

If enough people can be convinced that nothing will ever change, then meaningful change becomes almost impossible. People stop participating. They stop organising. They stop believing their actions matter.

It’s something I’ve come back to again and again on this channel with things like learned helplessness, authority bias and system justification.

They’re all different ways of describing the same underlying problem: when people lose the belief that they have agency, the status quo doesn’t have to work very hard to maintain itself.

That’s why I wanted this conversation to be more than an interview about economics.

We talked about what life on a trading floor actually does to the people inside it. We talked about billionaires, inequality, psychology and the stories we tell ourselves about wealth. We also talked about hope, because without that, none of the rest of it matters very much.

I hope you enjoy it.

As always, I’d love to know what you think, particularly where you disagree. Some of the best ideas on this channel have come from conversations that started in the comments.

Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that the live show returns next month, and thanks to your support we’ve now added a second date.

📍 5 August

📍 16 August (additional show)

It’s an evening of stand-up comedy, behavioural economics and the stories behind the videos. If you’d like to come along, it’d be great to see you there.

Watch Part One of my conversation with Gary Stevenson here:

Live show tickets:

https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

I love Downton Abbey.

Which is slightly inconvenient, because it’s a programme built around an aristocratic family living in extraordinary wealth, supported by a house full of servants.

It probably shouldn’t be comforting. And yet it is.

That was the question that sent me down the rabbit hole for this week’s video.

Not because I wanted to criticise Downton Abbey, but because I wanted to understand why stories about hierarchy can feel so reassuring.

John Jost’s work on System Justification Theory suggests that human beings have a remarkable ability to see existing systems as fair, even when those systems disadvantage us.

Robert Sapolsky’s research shows something equally striking: long periods spent lower in a hierarchy don’t just change our circumstances. They can change how our brains respond to stress, risk and uncertainty.

Taken together, they offer a different way of thinking about inequality.

Perhaps the greatest trick unequal systems ever pulled wasn’t convincing us they were perfect.

It was convincing us they were simply normal.

This week’s video explores that idea.

Watch here:

Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that Barry’s Economics Live returns next month.

📍 Wednesday 5 August: https://link.dice.fm/F2964cdedaee

📍 Sunday 16 August (extra date added): https://link.dice.fm/Aab63fdfe1d6

It’s a live version of many of the conversations on this channel, mixed with stand-up comedy, economics and the strange business of trying to make sense of modern life.

Tickets are available here: https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

Hopefully see some of you there.

Barry

For decades, politicians, journalists and commentators have tried to defeat Nigel Farage through exposure.

1. Expose the contradictions.

2. Expose the scandals.

3. Expose the inaccuracies.

And yet here we are.

The question isn’t whether those criticisms are valid.

The question is why they don’t seem to work.

This week’s video explores a possibility that most political analysis ignores:

What if Farage isn’t competing in the market for policies at all?

What if he’s competing in the acknowledgement market?

Because if people feel ignored for long enough, being heard can become more important than being agreed with.

The video uses research from Martin Seligman, Steven Maier, IMF inequality studies and behavioural economics to explore how that gap was created, why it persists, and why attacking the symptom often leaves the underlying demand untouched.

Watch here:

Barry’s Economics Live Returns

A quick reminder that Barry’s Economics Live is back next month.

After the last show sold strongly, we’ve added a second date.

📍 5 August
📍 16 August (new date added)

The show combines stand-up comedy with many of the themes explored on the channel: economics, psychology, inequality, work, failure, ambition and the stories we tell ourselves about all of them.

Nominated for Best New Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2025.

“A marvelous, personal, beautifully constructed and laughter-packed show” ★★★★★ — ThreeWeeks

Tickets available here: https://dice.fm/artist/barry-ferns-oyyby

Hopefully see some of you there.

Barry

Who invented the sandwich?

The traditional answer is the Earl of Sandwich, who supposedly asked for meat between two slices of bread in 1762.

The problem is that people had been putting food inside bread for centuries before the Earl came along.

Which raises an interesting question:

If he didn’t invent it, why does he get the credit?

The obvious answer is that he was wealthy, powerful and famous.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised economics works in surprisingly similar ways.

Because power isn’t just about owning things.

It’s also about naming things.

Take terms like “job creators.”

Or “wealth creators.”

Or even “economic growth.”

These sound like neutral descriptions. Objective facts. The sort of language sensible people use.

But language isn’t neutral.

Every phrase highlights some things and hides others. Every label tells a story about what matters, who matters, and what solutions we’re supposed to take seriously.

The people who get to name a problem often get a head start in deciding how everyone else thinks about it.

That’s why arguments about economics often feel strangely circular.

People aren’t always disagreeing about the evidence.

They’re disagreeing about the story.

This week’s video is really about that.

How power shapes language.

How language shapes perception.

And why the ability to define reality is often more valuable than the ability to argue about it.

Also, I travelled to Sandwich, Kent to make it.

Which is either dedication to a joke or evidence that I’ve finally lost perspective.

Watch here:

Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that Barry’s Economics Live returns on Wednesday 5th August.

It’s a stand-up comedy show about economics, psychology, work, failure and what people have to do to survive when the systems around them increasingly seem designed for spreadsheets rather than human beings.

The show was nominated for Best New Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2025 and received some genuinely lovely reviews:

“A marvelous, personal, beautifully constructed and laughter-packed show” ★★★★★ — ThreeWeeks

Tickets are available here: https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/pyb738-barrys-economics-live-5th-aug-the-bill-murray-london-tickets?dice_id=9363128&dice_channel=web&dice_tags=organic&dice_campaign=DICE&dice_feature=mio_marketing&utm_source=web&utm_campaign=DICE&utm_medium=mio_marketing

Hopefully see some of you there.

Barry

Then something changed.

Over the last twenty-five years they’ve become one of the defining cultural stories of our age.

• The Walking Dead.

• 28 Days Later.

• World War Z.

• The Last of Us.

The obvious explanation is that audiences simply started enjoying zombie stories more.

But what if that’s backwards?

What if zombie stories became popular because they reflected something people were already feeling?

This week’s video isn’t really about horror.

It’s about trust.

It’s about insecurity.

It’s about what happens when large numbers of people begin to feel that the systems around them are becoming harder to understand, harder to influence and less capable of protecting them.

The behavioural science in this video ranges from Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler to Tristan Harris and some of the people who helped build the modern attention economy.

But the central question is surprisingly simple:

Why did millions of people begin imagining societal collapse at the exact moment many of them were becoming less confident about the future?

And perhaps more importantly:

What do we do about it?

Barry’s Economics Live

A quick reminder that Barry’s Economics Live returns on Wednesday 5th August.

A stand-up comedy show about economics, psychology, work, failure and surviving modern life without becoming completely deranged by it.

Nominated for Best New Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2025.

Tickets here: https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/pyb738-barrys-economics-live-5th-aug-the-bill-murray-london-tickets?dice_id=9363128&dice_channel=web&dice_tags=organic&dice_campaign=DICE&dice_feature=mio_marketing&utm_source=web&utm_campaign=DICE&utm_medium=mio_marketing

Thanks again for reading, watching and supporting the channel.

Barry

That framing is comfortable. It turns him into something familiar. Someone who makes clever images on walls that later get sold, framed, or turned into headlines about auction prices.

But that misses the point entirely.

Because Banksy has never really been interesting because of what his work is worth.

He’s interesting because of where it appears, what it does in public space, and what it reveals about how power actually works when nobody is officially in charge of it.

The latest video was filmed across London and Bristol in front of more than 20 original Banksy works. But it isn’t really about Banksy.

It’s about something more structural.

It’s about ownership without consent.
It’s about public space that behaves like private space.
And it’s about the uncomfortable fact that some systems only stay stable because enough people agree to treat them as normal.

Economists have argued about versions of this for decades.

Elinor Ostrom showed that shared resources don’t automatically collapse without top-down control.
Garrett Hardin argued the opposite, that collective use leads to inevitable breakdown.

Banksy’s work sits right inside that tension.

Because it keeps pointing at something we don’t like to think about:

That cooperation, authority, and control are not as fixed as they look when you’re standing inside them.

And that a lot of what we call “order” is actually just repeated agreement.

Watch here:

A Quick Note On The Live Show!

Barry’s Economics Live returns on Wednesday 5th August.

It’s a stand-up show about economics, psychology, inequality, and what it feels like to try and function inside systems that don’t always behave in ways that match the stories we tell ourselves about them.

The show was nominated for Best New Show at Leicester Comedy Festival 2025.

Tickets here: https://dice.fm/partner/tickets/event/pyb738-barrys-economics-live-5th-aug-the-bill-murray-london-tickets?dice_id=9363128&dice_channel=web&dice_tags=organic&dice_campaign=DICE&dice_feature=mio_marketing&utm_source=web&utm_campaign=DICE&utm_medium=mio_marketing

Thanks again for reading and supporting the channel.

It genuinely is what allows these videos to exist in the first place.

Electric cars.
Space travel.
Solar power.

He felt like the closest thing we had to a real-life Tony Stark.

And now he’s… this.

Most conversations about Elon Musk focus on what he’s done.

This week’s video asks a different question.

What happened to him?

Because behavioural science and neuroscience may have an answer.

For decades, researchers studying wealth, power and cognition have found evidence that extreme power changes how people process the world around them.

Including:

• reduced empathy

• reduced perspective-taking

• weakened social mirroring

• and increased psychological distance from ordinary human experience

Which means the phrase “power corrupts” may not be metaphorical at all.

The unsettling part isn’t what this says about Elon Musk specifically.

It’s what it says about anybody with enough power.

Watch here:

Tax wealth.
Don’t tax wealth.
They’ll leave.
No they won’t.

Round and round.

So what if the debate itself is the trap?

Much of the conversation focuses on one question:

“What is the perfect wealth tax?”

But that assumes the central issue is tax design.

Meanwhile, something much larger continues happening in the background.

• Capital continues concentrating into assets.

• Inequality continues widening.

• And the broader structural dynamics remain largely untouched.

Which creates a strange situation.

The debate becomes increasingly detailed while the underlying trajectory remains the same.

At some point, it starts resembling people arguing about steering while the car continues moving toward the cliff.

This week’s video looks at why debates around inequality and wealth taxes become so circular, and what may be getting missed in the process.

Watch here:

Not commented on it.

Changed it.

In this week’s video, I speak to Mark Thomas about how change actually happens.

Not in theory, but in practice.

On this channel, we spend a lot of time looking at systems.

Inequality.
Taxation.
Who owns what.

But there is another question that matters just as much.

What does it actually take to change those systems?

One answer is uncomfortable.

The belief that nothing can change is one of the most powerful forces maintaining the status quo.

Because if people believe that, they stop trying before anything begins.

This conversation looks at what happens when that belief is challenged.

And what change looks like when someone decides to engage with it anyway.

Watch the short version here:

The full conversation is available on Patreon: https://patreon.com/BarrysEconomics?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink

17th May, 7pm
At The Bill Murray, London

The show combines stand-up comedy with the economics of being a comedian, and what it takes to survive when the system, psychology and the world feel against you.

It was nominated for Best New Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival (2025), and has received:

Tickets here: https://dice.fm/event/7dm7l9-barrys-economics-live-17th-may-the-bill-murray-london-tickets

Redistribute more or grow the economy.

Round and round.

So why does nothing actually get fixed?

One possibility is that something important is missing from the conversation.

In most fields, bias is accounted for.

Medicine does it.
Law does it.
Aviation does it.

Because decisions made without accounting for bias tend to go wrong.

In economic policy, this is less common.

There is often an assumption that decision-makers are seeing the system clearly.

But research in behavioural science suggests that our position within a system shapes how we perceive it.

As wealth and power increase, certain experiences become less visible.

Constraints.
Trade-offs.
Everyday risks.

Which means that different groups may be working from very different versions of reality.

If that bias isn’t recognised, debates can become circular.

Not because people are unwilling to solve the problem.

But because something important never makes it into the room.

In this week’s video I look at the research behind that idea, and why accounting for bias in economic thinking may be more important than we realise.

Watch here:

But what if the process of becoming extremely wealthy makes that less likely?

Our understanding of the world is shaped by our experiences.

And as wealth increases, certain experiences begin to disappear.

Financial constraints.
Trade-offs.
Everyday forms of risk.

Research in behavioural science suggests that we rely heavily on what is available in our own experience when forming judgments.

Which creates a problem.

As someone’s experience becomes less representative of the average person, their ability to interpret that experience accurately may also change.

There is also evidence that power can alter how people relate to others, including their ability to read emotions and perspectives.

Combined with attribution bias, this can make success appear more predictable and controllable than it really is.

So over time, something unusual happens.

The people whose experience becomes less representative…

Are often treated as if it is more authoritative.

In this week’s video I look at the neuroscience of power, the psychology of wealth, and why we treat certain individuals as if they have universal answers.

Watch here:

This isn’t one of them.

Because the debate you’ve been watching isn’t really about men or women.

It’s about something else.

Research across psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics points in a similar direction.

Social media amplifies moral outrage.

Group identity forms quickly and shapes how people interpret information.

Social exclusion activates the same systems in the brain as physical pain.

Which makes belonging a powerful force.

When these things interact inside platforms optimised for engagement, certain patterns emerge.

Content that creates identity.

Identity that creates conflict.

Conflict that sustains attention.

What looks like a cultural debate may also be a product of the system itself.

In this week’s video I look at the research behind that process, and why the conversation might not be about what it appears to be about.

Watch here:

And yet it still feels like it’s not enough.

That’s not a personal failure.

It’s the system working exactly as designed.

Modern economies depend on growth.

Growth depends on consumption.

And consumption depends on people continuing to want more.

Research across neuroscience, psychology and economics suggests that this isn’t accidental.

Dopamine drives wanting, not satisfaction.

Beyond a certain point, increases in income stop translating into increases in wellbeing.

And materialistic value systems are associated with lower life satisfaction.

Which creates a tension.

The system functions best when people keep striving.

But individuals don’t necessarily become happier as a result.

So when the feeling of “not enough” shows up, the explanation becomes personal.

You’re not doing enough.
Not achieving enough.
Not optimising enough.

But what if that feeling is structural?

In this week’s video I look at the science behind that idea, and why the problem may not be ambition itself, but the way it’s being directed.

The first thing my brain did wasn’t celebrate.

It said: do it again.

That reaction is not accidental.

It’s the same system that shapes what you watch on these platforms.

Every major social media platform is built on behavioural reinforcement.

It rewards certain actions and encourages repetition.

For viewers, that means your feed is not random.

For creators, it means success creates pressure to adapt.

Research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that variable rewards are one of the most effective ways to shape behaviour.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question.

What happens when both audiences and creators are inside the same system?

Over time, things begin to shift.

Not necessarily towards what is most accurate or valuable.

But towards what performs best.

In this week’s video I look at the science behind that process, and why the people experiencing the most success may also be the most affected by it. Including me!

Watch here: