Background
Twenty-two years in financial services
Spencer worked in financial services from 1997 until 2019, spending approximately 22 years providing face-to-face financial and wealth-management advice to clients. During the final five years of his career, he worked with St. James’s Place.
His work involved dealing directly with individuals and families and discussing areas such as financial planning, investments, pensions, protection and longer-term wealth management. This gave him many years of practical exposure to the way people build, manage and think about wealth and financial security.
Although The Redistribution Paradox is not a financial-advice book, that background inevitably contributed to his longstanding interest in wealth, ownership and the different ways financial circumstances develop over time. The book takes those interests much further, looking at wealth from a broader economic and societal perspective and questioning what happens when we attempt to address inequality through redistribution.
The Redistribution Paradox: Power, Influence, and the Hidden Risks of Equality is his debut book.
How it began
The origin of the paradox
The book began somewhere ordinary: a post on Facebook about Elon Musk’s wealth and the idea of redistributing it.
It is the kind of argument that fills a comment thread for an afternoon and then disappears. For Spencer, it didn’t. His curiosity about wealth, inequality, power and opportunity grew into reading, then research, then reflection, and finally into writing.
Somewhere along the way, a simple question turned into a much harder one.
- 01A post
- 02A question
- 03Research & reflection
- 04A book
Approach
An approach built on questions
Spencer didn’t set out to prove a point. He set out to understand one. The book draws on the work of economists, historians, journalists and researchers, while the opinions and conclusions in its pages are his own.
He isn’t interested in cheering for one side of the debate or booing the other. He wants to show why the debate is harder, and more important, than it first appears.
This is not about pointing at the wealthy and booing.
“Whether you agree with my conclusions or challenge them, my hope is that the ideas presented here encourage deeper discussion about the relationship between wealth, power and equality in modern society.”
The book is dedicated to his late father, who showed him that it is never too late to pursue an idea.
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The Redistribution Paradox
Start with the question that started it all.
The Redistribution Paradox: Power, Influence and the Hidden Risks of Equality.