Why The Rich Think The Poor Are Lazy

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 freedom to actually do something.

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.

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This channel digs into how systems of power shape our identity, behaviour, and beliefs, and how we can shift the stories we tell ourselves and each other about poverty, inequality, and who’s to blame.

Chapters
00:00 - 01:09 Introduction
01:09 - 01:54 The objection to redistribution
01:54 - 02:14 The underlying question
02:14 - 06:34 Addiction unmasked
06:34 - 11:48 How having less affects us
11:48 - 14:44 The fundamental attribution error
14:44 - 18:58 Self-serving bias
18:58 - 29:00 Where redistribution has been used
29:00 - 30:28 The motivation myth
30:28 - 33:51 Lets change the story

How to Support Barry’s Economics
Help us stay independent and keep making videos like this.
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If you’re new to this, check out @garyseconomics first – his channel gives the structural and financial perspective. This one adds the lived, social and emotional side.

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Want to see the stand-up side of all this?
Find my live comedy and storytelling here:
https://www.youtube.com/@mrbarryferns

To learn more about my comedy club, Angel Comedy, and buy tickets for shows head here: https://www.angelcomedy.co.uk/

Sources & further reading

Bruce K. Alexander et al.
The "Rat Park" experiments, Simon Fraser University, c. 1978–1981
Alexander, Coambs & Hadaway, Psychopharmacology (1978)
Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir
Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013)
Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao
"Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function", Science (2013)
Ross Levine & Yona Rubinstein
"Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More?", Quarterly Journal of Economics (2017
Finnish Basic Income Experiment
Final results, Kela / Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (2020)
Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED)
Preliminary results (2021)
Evelyn Forget
"The Town with No Poverty" (2011), analysis of the Mincome experiment
GiveDirectly
Universal Basic Income study, Kenya, ongoing since 2011

#BarrysEconomics #GarysEconomics #Inequality #BehaviouralEconomics #SocialJustice #BarryFerns #ComedyWithDepth