Our new working paper Foundational liveability: rethinking territorial inequalities is a response  to political demands in Wales and requests from academic colleagues: “If the main steam has per capita GVA and GDP, where are our simple, intelligible foundational measures”  Hence this paper about household residual income and foundational liveability. This incidentally undermines the idea of a successful or failed region with a unitary character because most regions are liveable for some types of household and unliveable for others. It also makes the connection to financialised capitalism because linkages to wealth accumulation are at least as important as earned income.The empirics in the paper show how this reframes the UK regional problem because we need policies for taxing unearned income and wealth in London as much as for boosting the Welsh productive economy.