2025 is a year when I can do what I want – as technically, I will have retired. And what I want to do is make educational videos.

This is the audio version:

And this is the transcript:

What am I going to do in 2025?

It is perhaps the year when I have more opportunity to change my agenda than, well, for many years past because in 2024, I took some pretty big decisions.

I stopped being a chartered accountant. I'm no longer regulated to provide services, so that if people ask me to do it, I can't. And that's quite liberating.

I decided to retire as a professor, although I've become an emeritus professor as a consequence.

I decided to stop taking on new grants for work that meant I was doing what other people wanted.

And I've decided to do something which, in very many ways, I have not been able to do for a long time, which is what I want. And I think that inevitably is liberating.

Now this isn't anything which is in a sense surprising for a man of my age. I am 66, heading soon for 67, and I could claim to be retired. And when people are retired, they do what they want. So, this isn't anything irresponsible or, in a sense, unlikely at my point in life.

And yet, I don't want to go through the standard retirement routine that people seem to do.

I won't be rushing off on multiple cruises this year. Nor am I joining a golf club, and I'm not going to be wandering around the shops wondering how to fill my day. I'm actually really excited.

Tony Benn once said that when he was going to leave Parliament, he would do so to take up politics again. And I feel that, in a very real sense, I'm giving up being a professor so that I can do education again. And I've done education for a long time. I've been lecturing about tax, finance and accounting and various things throughout my career. I started when I was in my mid-twenties, and I'm still going now. And I want to talk about all those things that excite me into the camera that you're seeing me through now.

2024 was a year which laid the foundation for this, although I didn't really expect that.

The blog that I write had phenomenal results. 6. 9 million reads. And that was a record. The previous high was 5 million in 2023.

This YouTube channel that you're watching just took off in a way that I could never have expected. By the end of the year, we'll have had more than 7. 5 million views in 2024, which makes it bigger than the blog.

Twitter declined, but then Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and I, amongst many others, have ceased to give it very much attention. It just isn't the place to be anymore.

But Blue Sky is, and I'm putting attention there now, and that is going to be my main social media platform of that sort.

But what do I want to do with all of this? I find myself retired with the opportunity to do things, and a number of things in 2024 did take me by surprise and suggest that there are agendas to look at.

One of the things that took me by surprise was the Taxing Wealth Report. Now I wrote it, so why am I saying it took me by surprise? Well, because I feel as though it opened up agendas that need further exploration and explanation. It showed that the capacity to use tax as an agent for change within the UK economy is a very long way from being expired.

There is an opportunity to create progressive taxation to reallocate income and wealth in the UK, and I find that really exciting.

There are opportunities to use tax reliefs and allowances, particularly on pensions and other types of saving, to redirect capital in the way that society wants and needs so that we can, for example, have the investment in the measures necessary to tackle climate change that will guarantee our future. We have an incredibly powerful tool available to us, and we need to understand how to use it.

But that wasn't the only thing that surprised me in this past year. The decline of economics as we know it has become glaringly obvious. When economics has informed a politics that is so obviously failing, we know that neoliberalism is effectively dead. And we know that there is a present, very little alternative to it.

I know that Kate Raworth has done a great job, for example, with doughnut economics, but it isn't, in my opinion, a comprehensive way of viewing the economy as a whole. It's an explanation of a part of the economic problem, and I'm not dismissing that, but I think we need to have a more comprehensive view of an alternative economics than it provides. And I'm not finding that in any place, really.

I love the work that Steve Keen is doing because he's explaining why economics is wrong in so many ways around themes that relate closely to modern monetary theory. And there I'd suggest that Stephanie Kelton has done great work, but we need to wed all this together.

So I'm excited about the idea that this is a theme for 2025, and I'm working really hard at present on noting how to develop that theme on economics, which will happen on this channel.

But at the same time, I was in 2024 involved with another project around accounting, and this was the one that created Accounting Streams.

I worked with Professor Susan Smith and Jenni Rose of Manchester University, and we created a new accountancy textbook that looks at accountancy in a different way to just about every other available textbook that there is on the market now because we did not assume that accountancy is all about profit maximisation in large multinational corporations, but could, just as easily, be about a coffee shop, a stall in a market, a hospital, or an NGO, or charity, or any other type of organisation, all of whom need information to make good decisions. And I feel that accounting is an area which has been much neglected in the whole sphere of economic thinking.

Steve Keen shares that view, I know, because he believes, as I do, that if you don't understand double entry, you can't do economics because every action always has a reaction in the economy, and that is a fact that is simply not reflected in economics as it has been taught. And so, I'm quite keen to look at how we teach accountancy.

And as a consequence, we may launch another YouTube channel during the course of this year to address that theme. And that quite excites me because this is about raising financial literacy and the ability to understand the way in which organisations that are the building blocks of our economy really work.

How do I look at 2025? I look at it now as a year when I change my approach to work, and when education becomes the very core of what I want to do.

One of the curious aspects of saying that I was retiring was the number of job offers I've had. Several people have approached me and said, well now you've got time on your hands, would you like to do this, that or the other. The offers are quite interesting. But I've decided not to do them. I want to do my own thing.

I want to go and look at these issues.

To explain what the problems are.

To talk about what the solutions might be.

To explain how they can be relevant to people's lives.

To look at what the consequences of these changes, if only we were to properly understand the impact of these various aspects of the economy, and to then say, how can you take this understanding forward?

I have no way of knowing whether this will work, but it's what I want to achieve.

It's much more exciting than thinking about cruising around the Mediterranean, the Caribbean or anywhere else.

It's a lot more carbon efficient as well, but it's more than that. It's about doing something that I wanted to do for a long time - to explain on the basis of over 40 years of experience in the real world, how I think that real world works to people like you who have to live in that real world and understand the consequences of doing so, so that you might be able to build something better.

And that, ultimately, will be the goal of all of this work.