Gary's angle is wrong. He's got a book to flog and a channel to promote.

It's crystal clear we can build new houses and new businesses, so suggesting 'wealth' is a zero sum game is ideological folly.

As to his thesis, here's the demolition of mathematics within it: https://birchlermuesli.substack.com/p/copy-garys-badeconomic...

He doesn't suggest that the economy is a zero sum game, but that the distribution of that wealth matters and in our societies we're increasingly distributing wealth unevenly so that tiny minority of people increasingly control and own all the wealth, assets and means of production thus depriving other people of economic opportunities and crippling the economies.

In your example of building more, in order to a new building get erected someone owns the land, someone owns the materials, someone owns all the assets and the capital required to build. The people who invest to this will of course want to turn a profit on it.

I'm neither an economist or mathematician. But I'm smart enough to observe my surroundings. I observe that the middle class is shrinking rapidly. Wealth concentration is increasing rapidly. Income has not kept up with the price of goods. And it's increasingly difficult for working people to accumulate wealth.

Can you point me to other theories which articulate the cause of my observations?