Jun 5, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min · 12 segments
Why are young people being priced out of everything? In this episode, Andrew breaks down the real reason the cost of living is spiralling, why house prices are unaffordable, and how government policy…
Andrew CraigGuestJay LawrenceHost
But I do think it's grounded in being a student of economics and company economics and everything else for 30 plus years.
The reason that young people are finding it so hard, let's focus on the property data, but it's everything else besides.
And one of the things that exercises me so much at the moment with all this left, right, billionaires, pro-billionaires, anti-billionaires, wealth taxes, Gary Stevenson, whatever else, is that this just gets lost.
The idea, the two ideas that are just completely Orwellian nonsense, right? First, the idea that there's been any austerity.
It was an Orwellian nonsense word, right? Because in the whole time that we allegedly had austerity, the size of the British government, the size of the state and the amount of borrowing went up and up and up and up.
Real austerity is what we had in the Victorian era when we were incredibly growthy and deflationary and created railways.
I'm not suggesting we go back there, but basically government in years gone by in many parts of the world where societies have been incredibly successful, there's been as low as 12 or 15% of the economy.
Well, if you honestly account for the British state, it's probably more than 100% of the economy, right? So there's been no austerity.
Thatcher managed to reign in the state a little bit in the 80s, relative to what had gone before, particularly the 70s, where, remember, Britain was a total basket case and we had to go to the IMF to get bailed out.
But I do think it's grounded in being a student of economics and company economics and everything else for 30 plus years.
The reason that young people are finding it so hard, let's focus on the property data, but it's everything else besides.
And one of the things that exercises me so much at the moment with all this left, right, billionaires, pro-billionaires, anti-billionaires, wealth taxes, Gary Stevenson, whatever else, is that this just gets lost.
The idea, the two ideas that are just completely Orwellian nonsense, right? First, the idea that there's been any austerity.
It was an Orwellian nonsense word, right? Because in the whole time that we allegedly had austerity, the size of the British government, the size of the state and the amount of borrowing went up and up and up and up.
Real austerity is what we had in the Victorian era when we were incredibly growthy and deflationary and created railways.
I'm not suggesting we go back there, but basically government in years gone by in many parts of the world where societies have been incredibly successful, there's been as low as 12 or 15% of the economy.
Well, if you honestly account for the British state, it's probably more than 100% of the economy, right? So there's been no austerity.
Thatcher managed to reign in the state a little bit in the 80s, relative to what had gone before, particularly the 70s, where, remember, Britain was a total basket case and we had to go to the IMF to get bailed out.
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