City profiles

Gary Stevenson

The campaigner behind the YouTube channel GarysEconomics earned enough money during his six years as a trader at Citigroup in London to never work again, said Rupert Neate in The Observer. In doing so, Stevenson, 35, fulfilled a childhood dream. “I was a clever, poor, ambitious kid who just didn’t want to be poor any more.” But he didn’t just walk away – he started to denounce his former career as an exercise in “betting on inequality”, and now works “to right the system” via his videos. Stevenson describes inequality as an untreated “cancer in our economy” that won’t be fixed until the backgrounds of politicians and economists better reflect society. “These guys think the economy’s great, because it’s great for them… The only way to change the system is to make the people really f***ing angry about it.”

Vladimir Mau

Ever since Vladimir Putin “railed about the traitors in Russia’s midst” in March, many people deemed “insufficiently patriotic” have been arrested, said The New York Times. But the detention of Vladimir Mau – an economist and Gazprom board member – represents a step up in aggression. Mau, who faces fraud charges, “was in no way a public critic of the Kremlin”. He had, however, signed an open letter calling the invasion of Ukraine “necessary” and had just been re-elected to the Gazprom board. His misfortune was to be a “systemic liberal”, who was working from within to make Putin’s system slightly more “open”. His fall is proof of the Kremlin’s determination to “snuff out pockets of dissent”.