Richard Murphy's remarkable set of 737 Videos and Blogposts

I'm a big fan of Richard Murphy's videos and blogposts.  You can find them all at his taxresearch.org.uk website.

 He has an amazing track record, having set up the Tax Justice Network in 2003, and although he is no longer directly involved, it still produces an excellent monthly podcast called the TaxCast, presented by Naomi Fowler, and which now numbers 156 episodes. 

But since retiring from his position as professor of Accounting at Sheffield University's School of Management, he has been putting an enormous amount of effort into generating a huge number of very clear and educational videos on many aspects of politics and economic reform. 

Perhaps the best place to find them is on his Youtube channel, where you can find literally hundreds of them. This screen shot shows just the 16 latest videos, produced in the last 13 days. He seems to produce at least one every day,  with some days where he produces up to three! Remarkable. And his prolific output is difficult to keep up with, even for fans like myself! Even just those 16 most recent videos total 154 minutes - over 2.5 hours! Personally, I find that I can listen to the videos speeded up by a factor of 1.5 or 1.7, but it still requires a lot of my time to keep up.  I honestly don't know how he does it!

 

To help you navigate through this wealth  of information, Richard has also curated a set of playlists devoted to specific topics.

1. Economics - 49 videos
2. Britain - 91 videos
3. Tax - 16 videos
4. MMT - 14 videos
5. Money- 39 videos
6. Climate Change - 6 videos
7. USA - 34 videos
8. Labour - 61 videos
9. The Trump Administration - 22 videos
10. The Weath series - 11 videos

And, he even has a "Best Of" set of 41 videos, which would probably be a good place to start

Together, that makes a total of 343 videos and counting - assuming that all the videos were assigned to a specific playlist! 

 I honestly think that if you want to learn about a topic, you could try simply choosing one of those playlists, and listening to them in order.  

I must admit that I am a bit jealous. Back in November, I started generating my own series of "Quick Thoughts" videos, but I only managed to do 6 of them, including 

• Trump Election Aftermath
• Could Trump and Musk push for a Global Universal Basic Income? 
• Eradicating debt by minting trillion dollar platinum coins 
• How to find $1.3 trillion a year to fight climate change 
• Scrap Inheritance Taxes and tax Net Wealth instead

 But, I must confess, I can't see myself competing with Richard's remarkably professional videos. I must get a tool like the one he uses that automatically provides animated captions while he is talking.

The 343 videos that have been assigned to playlists may seem like a lot. But I have just H made a listing of all the videos that Richard has generated over the past 5 years - and the total number is an incredible 737! Given that they typically last 5 minutes or so, that is almost certainly at least 60 hours of video to explore. 

Now, I have not listened to everything, and it is likely that there is a fair bit of redundancy in there. Nevertheless, I have seen enough to convince me that the content is really very convincing. 

The vast majority of what Richard says makes perfect sense to me. And I can see that our ambitions are very closely aligned. He too is driven my a strong sense of the importance of living in a fair and just society which ensures that everyone can live a decent life. It turns out that we are very much the same vintage - he was brought up in Essex, whereas I was raised in West Sussex. 

One frustrating thing is that I have yet to see Richard debate directly with others. He is very critical of nearly all politicians, and is frankly rude about the economic competence of the Rachel Reeves, the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer. He argues very well, and it would be really good to see him go head to head with the people he has criticized.

So, I'm globally very positive about everything Richard has been doing, and his attempts to change the way that the economy is designed. That said, there are a number of areas where I think that his arguments are not convincing, and where I think alternatives exist. I will devote a few blog posts to looking at these points of divergence.