“As for those who wish to be enlightened, a subscription to The Economist would be a good start and a welcome Christmas gift. And the web offers huge opportunities - such as this website - for those who seek enlightenment.”

Excellent point, and you can also find it on the shelves in the magazine shop alongside Wired magazine, Vogue and car mechanics/superbike.

I have to confess, I am a ‘Trout and Salmon’ kind of guy myself. But putting it bluntly, at 35 years of age, I am old enough to know that reading is good, it is positive and it may assist younger people not to flunk out of college. Like I said, I have a PHd in fly-fishing, but not much else unfortunately.

Thumbs up to the Economist too.

I also recommend, if you are a working man like me, a visit to Illac public library and photo an article or two from the Harvard Business Review that might grab your fancy. The articles are usually 8-pages long and photocopy cards are 2.00 euro at the desk.

“Of course it may also be enlightening and useful, but the citizen needs two things: (a) the costs of gaining that understanding need to be reduced and (b) the citizen needs to be convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Great point Brian.

On the other hand, I have watched the US federal TV station PBS on the web lately. There is a program on it called ‘The Frontline’. It does fit squarely into the category you describe of giving it to ‘citizens’ in an hour long chunk they can digest and go away happy with. It is a good program and well put together.

However, and I direct this to David McWilliams also in my criticism - there is a trend nowadays for young people my age (30’s) to buy heavy books by Robert Fisk, Joseph Stiglitz or Noam Chomsky. Put them on a self and then go to You Tube to find something ‘like that’ that can explain it in half an hour. You go to a rock concert and you can stumble into a tent and find David McWilliams engaging in a row over economics.

Sure people consume info-entertainment like this today. In fact, many of the anti-establishment protesters in streets etc are pumped up on this stuff. It has to be a bit cheap, it has to be a bit sensationalist. Its not the real thing. It will never be the real thing. The question is, I read Alan Greenspan’s autobiography. But I will not get any ‘advantage’ in pub talk conversation, because many of my friends have watched the ‘Frontline’ documentary, one hour duration, on PBS website which ‘refers’ to Alan Greenspan’s autobiography.

I know people who bought Naomi Klein’s book ‘No Logo’ and ‘Shock Doctrine’ to decorate their selves with. It makes them feel subversive, like wearing a Chez Gavara T-shirt. They are essential assessories if you have angst about the world. But the same people base their opinions on watch-ing of the DVD box set of the BBC’s spy series, Spooks. Which I am informed is based on ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein.

Bearing in mind, Klein’s literature is baked for ease-of-consumption to begin with. So my best guess, is that David McWilliams reads the Shock Doctrine, everyone else watches the Spooks DVD box set and they all get together in the tent at the Oxygen festival because they like the sounds of their own voices sounding knowledge-able about global power instability!

“In fairness to the IT and RTE they have both had extensive economic coverage over recent periods but can you imagine either organ operating without specialist sport journalists for a single day?”

Wow, you are right, that would be serious.

Civil unrest.

Or maybe peace demonstration.

Within hours it would be like the crowds that gathered spontaneously when the Berlin wall was about to fall.

“What professional services are an input cost for businesses and are sheltered from competition/downward pressure?”

Architectural design services are very much an input cost for the construction industry. The fact is Zhou, if you had grown up, trained and worked in one of the ’sheltered sections’ of Ireland’s economy, you would not like it. It is repressive to say the least.

The competition authority did a study a number of years ago. I still have the PDF on my hard drive somewhere and have been meaning to study it. But there is a very poor competition in architecture.

You cannot compare being in a backward profession, to something like computers, or finance, or even medicine where modern-isation is so much better.

Two examples.

(1)

I know the editor of a couple of the construction trade journals here in Ireland. She came to her job from working in a medical journal before. She noted in medicine there was no shortage of people willing to submit material to the journal for publication on this and on that. You know, modern research and ideas in treatment of patients.

Anyhow, when she started to edit the construction magazine she assumed getting material and contributions from architects would be no problem, as in the medical field. But no, there wasn’t any architects who wanted to put their name to any submission, much less take the time to write up something.

This is why Frank McDonald of the Irish Times is the lone voice in the wilderness for published commentary about architecture. Because the remainder of the profession are content to allow Frank stand up there and be the only one with anything to say. Even though Frank is no more an architect than the man in the moon. (Frank is very good at national spatial planning, global environment and does an okay attempt at buildings etc, but nothing like a real professional would)

When Cormac Lucey refers to the lack of a dedicated economics editor at the Irish Times and at RTE tv studio, it is sort of like the same thing. Duncan Stewart was a tutor of mine in college and though he has done a lot of work to draw attention to design and construction in the media, he tends to be dismissed by many in the construction industry.

(2)

I had a pal who used to meet me at Stillorgan some days for lunch. This is in weekdays. His job was as an architect at the OPW in St. Stephen’s Green. He would drive out from town to meet me at Stillorgan and we would have pub grub. Then he would sit back into his car and be back in time for work.

I was listening to some old recording on the radio not so long ago with John Bowman. He was talking to some poet or artist about his life. He described how in Dublin, it was not uncommon for professional gentlemen to travel home to the inner suburbs to have lunch with their wives. That was the ‘pedestrian’ kind of tempo of life there was in Dublin of the 50s.

I cannot help but think that architecture is stuck in that time warp. Heck, I used to work for a developer who rented a lot of space to the OPW. We all knew that in meetings with the OPW, you had to find a reason to ‘break up’ the meeting. Otherwise, they would want to hang around, drink coffee and chat all day long. It was notorious. On the one hand, you had to get some work done but at the same time you had to ‘entertain’ the OPW professional staff!

Lastly, there is the problem of ’shuffling around paper’ at the OPW. The same design project can go through several generations of staff, without anything happening to it. A recently completed office building project admired by Frank McDonald in his wrap-up of the decade was seven years on the drawing board. I am told by reliable sources, the trick in the OPW, is not to do any new drawing - simply change the name on the title block to your name and put it back in the drawer. Sometime after the seven years it might come out and go to construction stage. It is the same drawing with the ‘drawn by’ name changed several times!

The point I am trying to make, is that none of the professionals in the OPW want to operate in this mode. Many of them came from small private practices which work at a similar pace. But where job stability is hopeless. While the OPW isn’t exactly ground zero for innovation, the do treat people fairly and squarely. On the whole, I would say the return on investment for our taxpayers money in public building works has been okay. The point is, we would all prefer a more dynamic, modern work environment.

BTW, I tried to elaborate a small bit on the interaction of small professional servcies and larger ‘productive’ enterprise in Ireland here:

http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2009/12/13/the-irish-banking-system-unfinished-business/#comment-28263

I accept that (and I have no interest whatsoever in where chaps put their balls). But the citizen’s problem is that expertise in economics alone is not enough: there are all those other subjects as well. So many worlds, so little time.

bjg

The Economist has no sports or TV pages, what use would that be?

You’re right that building up expertise in economics can be bothersome and costly.

But so too can be building up an expertise in rugby, football, hurling, soccer or whatever and they are unlikely to have anything like the same impact on one’s life as economics. Yet people happily devote huge attention to sports because they offer escapism whereas economics appears to offer just constraints, hard realities and bitter choices.

As for those who wish to be enlightened, a subscription to The Economist would be a good start and a welcome Christmas gift. And the web offers huge opportunities - such as this website - for those who seek enlightenment.

But it is bothersome and costly. It takes three to four years to get even a basic understanding of a single discipline. A citizen’s views and choices may require an understanding of several disciplines; gaining that level of understanding, while not a full-time student, is a huge task.

Of course it may also be enlightening and useful, but the citizen needs two things: (a) the costs of gaining that understanding need to be reduced and (b) the citizen needs to be convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Citizens reading this blog are probably convinced of (b) and most of the contributing economists are willing to help with (a), but the gap in depth of understanding is still huge. But is there somewhere similar for political science, sociology, law, technology …? Or is it back to Wikipedia?

bjg

Is this an echo of Mary Coughlan’s ill judged comments about certain professions having not felt the “chill winds” of economic contraction? The only sheltered sector I can think of is certain parts of the medical/dental professions and they are not an input cost for most businesses. What professional services are an input cost for businesses and are sheltered from competition/downward pressure?

We need to examine EMU interest rates for the same reason we examine the weather: not because it is something we can influence but because it is something that influences us. The impact over the coming years (decade?) of EMU interest rates that are too high will be huge given our starting point of massive over-indebtedness.

@Graham @Kevin @Brian

You are both right about the limited ability of political leaders to absorb many conflicting economic viewpoints.

But does it not say something about the broader system’s limited desire to observe such viewpoints that the Irish Times has, since the death of Paul Tansey some years back, not had a specialist economics correspondent/editor? And ditto for RTE that has, until very recently, not had a specialised economics correspondent/editor since the departure of George Lee to contest the Dublin South bye-election?

These events took place in the middle of a depression having a massive impact on the finances, readers,viewers and listeners of the two media organs concerned. In fairness to the IT and RTE they have both had extensive economic coverage over recent periods but can you imagine either organ operating without specialist sport journalists for a single day?

There is a problem with an aspect of our national culture which can tend to regard learning as bothersome and costly rather than enlightening and useful.

http://designcomment.blogspot.com/2009/12/irish-economy-compilation-wages-and.html

As I have mentioned above, this system of re-organisation and presentation of ‘content’ available through the vein of the Irish Economy blog might be useful. My experience in ‘brainstrorming’ has been, that processing of the ideas ‘captured’ through the process is one of the heavier weight tasks to be done.

It always involves some kind of subjective assembly of the material - perhaps even leaving out bits that are worthy of inclusion - to try and develop some ‘picture’ of where the current debate might be at. Or going.

I grew up in a very sheltered professional sector of the economy myself. The profession of architecture. So I know the people who live and operate in those sectors. I also know precisely what to expect or not to expect of them. To be honest, the standard at the moment is fairly dismal. I am not sure if it has got better or worse. But I do know the implications are very painful for those people working in the sheltered sections. It is not good for people within those sheltered sections either. A few do well but the general population of members of the ’sheltered section’ suffer in many ways - lack of debate, lack of opportunity and lack of rewards.

It is a catch 22 situation Kevin. You look at a newspaper like the Daily Mail the other day and it leads with front page and inside page coverage of Paul Gogarty’s hit YouTube contribution to the house last week. In fairness to him, he did get across his point, “We are screwed as a country because of the wrong doing of others”.

But if a major portion of the country is okay with this as a standard of public debate in the main house, how are the ’sheltered professions’ ever going to have pressure put upon them to innovate and explore new ground?

The major mistake we will make when looking at sheltered sections of the economy, is to do exactly that, only look at those sections. What we really should be doing is to try and raise the bar or standards in general, across the board. That in turn will exert the pressure necessary on ’sheltered sections’ to try and do better.

That is what is so wonderful about the Green party in my opinion. You have guys like Eamon Ryan who freely admits he grew up himself as part of a ‘lost generation’ in Ireland. He knows all about it. What the Green party does is it gathers together a whole lot of people who had better aspirations to improve themselves and push standards upwards. Even coming from such a low base in terms of debating capabilities and speech-making charisma, it is amazing how much the Green party has done for guys like Paul Gogarty. It has raised their horizons and given them at least some confidence level.

The first is that it helps us to identify the appropriate policy response, give that we cannot devalue: wage and price cuts across the economy. As several posters pointed out, that implies inter alia measures to cut professional fees, and increase competition in sheltered sections.

The second is that it should discourage excessive optimism about the economy — which is important as we think about fiscal policy going forward.

The third is that it reminds us of the tiny impact that mainstream economic thought has on policy-making in this country. Peter Neary is Ireland’s most distinguished academic economist. Rodney Thom was the head of the UCD department. Both of them told anyone willing to listen about the risks of entering EMU without the UK. They were supported in this by most of the UCD department.

Given the economics of the situation, there were two sensible things the government could have done. The first was not to join EMU. The second was to join, but accept the constraints that EMU membership logically implied: very conservative fiscal policy in good times, and keeping a lid on wage and price growth, as the Germans have been doing. The government adopted a third approach, as we know.

Unless we find institutional mechanisms that wiill allow more economically literate, long term policies to be followed by governments, there may well be a third boom-bust cycle during my adult lifetime.

Sorry I am responding to you very late - possibly not worth it at this late stage in the thread - real life keeps getting in the way of my attempts to exist virtually.

You wrote: “If EMU interest rates that were too low over the period 1997-2007 spawned our credit / property bubble / bust then surely it behoves us to examine EMU interest rates today? ”

We all new the risks that Irish interest rates would be too high or too low when we entered the euro. No need to do a Taylor rule for that. No one is arguing that EMU didn’t contribute to the credit bubble, of course it did!

But there were also clear and difficult-to-measure advantages to being in the euro club, even if that meant taking the ‘wrong’ interest rates up the nose, as other posters have pointed out. It would all make a lovely research paper in a few years time, but that is not going to get the country back on a sound economic base.

My point is that no one now seriously feels we should leave the euro, therefore the question of whether interest rates are too high or not is moot. They are what they are, and its up to Irish policymakers to set policies (fiscal and regulatory) which make sense in that exogenous context.

I always point out that there is a relatively limited capacity for govt to absorb policy messages, get them past the asteroid field of political expediency, and transform them into actual legislation. Talking about what should have been done does not advance the Millenium Falcon of Irish politics through that particular asteroid field.

A summary of discussion - A way to make a collage of viewpoints and contributions

Maybe, a useful way to pull the discussion back together again, because it is quite confusing to follow the entire thread sometimes, is if someone makes ‘flag’ sort of like the one above, and offer their services to do a quick summary or compilation of useful contributions above, which may connect to on another.

Furthermore, a feature of the message board system system here, which I recently figured out for myself - is you can ‘click’ on the date underneath a commentator’s name and link directly to their comment, in another discussion if needs be.

I am going to employ this nifty feature in a moment, to try and ‘pull’ some of the points from nearby conversations, and place them in the middle for this one for reference.

“The warnings of the Central Bank and ESRI were wholly limp-wristed and represented downside, risk scenarios and not central, baseline scenarios.”

They did give us a warning….

They told us “we where the second richest country in Europe”.

Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous in your life!!! I remember listening to one afternoon show on radio, where housing was appreciating in value per day at a faster rate than a persons daily wage!! Your house earned more money than you could in a day!!! “The Emperor has no clothes”… history continues to repeat itself again and again.

Unfortunately most of us believed it, and now we are paying the price.

Good answer to PG. That might keep “him” quiet for a while. So there were voices whispering in the Tainaiste’s ear that domestic fiscal policy was inappropritate. If another course had been chosen from 2002 and property incentives scaled back in 2002 not 2006, public sector pay growth constrained and if the CB had followed its own advice in the mid decade the current situation would not be avoided but perhaps mitigated.

Yet as you point out, all of those drawing official salaries when these decisions were taken are still on the payroll whether as employees as pensioners. Moreover, the pensions of the elite PS who did the damage have yet to be touched while all those below who suffered due to these decisions have had their pay slashed.

But it corresponded with the view I articulated publicly under my pseudonym Sean Sexton at Magill magazine in their April/May 2005 edition:

“Where is all this leading? Simple. We can’t keep increasing our borrowings forever. The constraint on our indebtedness will not be interest rates as in previous decades. It will be our debt capacity. We risk maxing out on debt and thereby making ourselves vulnerable to any short-term economic set-back. The closest parallel may prove to be the Japanese economy. They too experienced a growth miracle built on a credit bubble induced by politically-determined interest rates. Their bubble was pricked in 1991. If their experience is anything to go by, the bursting of the Irish bubble would be a nightmare. The economy would prove impervious to monetary and fiscal stimulus, as individuals and corporations sought to curtail spending in order to reduce their bank borrowings. A downward spiral of asset prices, forced liquidations and further falls in asset prices could result. Growth would prove elusive and the financial sector would be in permanent crisis. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we may still have some distance to go before we hit our debt limit. So enjoy the party while it lasts. But don’t be taken in by it. And be wary of those economists who failed to predict this bubble, who don’t explain it and who certainly won’t dare to predict its end.”

The fundamental problems were however:
a. I am not an economist.
b. I was advising the Justice minister and not the Finance minister.
c. My viewpoint corresponded with no official advice.
d. When the party is going strong, nobody wants to read “alcohol awareness” leaflets however apposite they might be.

My question is where were the “professional” economists when all this was plain to see? The warnings of the Central Bank and ESRI were wholly limp-wristed and represented downside, risk scenarios and not central, baseline scenarios. Yet they still get paid by the State and get their indexed pensions.

I agree that a debt deflationary spiral has started in Ireland. It will teach all those who live, or try to live there, a much needed lesson.

I am a contrarian, as they say. You seem to advocate it also. But it is not being a contrarian to seek the easy way out Cormac! Rather take the less worn path and see what it brings. The lesson is unavoidable and postponing it will merely add to the cost! Being responsible and mature does not mean abandoning violence, else we would all abandon our standing armies! Violence may not be necessary and can be unpleasant but again, we should not take the easy choices!

Depriving people of resources is harsh but may not result in abject poverty. Confronting the fat cats with the fate of the losers may help them to decide to stop overcharging. Ireland is a cesspool. Succeeding there is not a matter of pride! Too many stupid laws and too many cronies mean that everyone with a conscience is sick of what has happened. But the lesson is unavoidable, Cormac. You now have to go through with it. Learn to live properly. Respect each other. Look after all, not just those who can be useful to you in your materialistic fantasies. Life is what happens to you while you are climbing the greasy pole. Some elements of competition are despicable. Irish people know these as they have had to put up with a bad neighbour for a long time. Now we are out competing but we neglected the golden rule. Who has the gold makes the rules! By feeding the cuckoo of unrestricted banking we fouled our own nest. The USA did it as a means to an end, Ireland did it through what, exactly? Whom can we blame? What is the lesson, Cormac?

I like to read your ramblings. Ireland produces too many graduates in architecture. Thoise who comtrol the construction industry always cut corners and regard good quality buildings as unnecessary it seems. Ticky tacky is OK?

Sad.

They have some chance but I suspect that vodka will overtake them. And illegal drugs, Afghanistan is the source of 90% of the worlds opium we are told. The Taliban were rather naughty to women and deserve destruction, but they also stopped production of all poppies! Oh dear! No no no! We need a war OF drugs! Who needs tariffs if we can peddle drugs to the competition? This is a matter of survival Brian! Much better than a real war?

Ooooh! What a gal! Now we know why some adopt anonymity! Well said though. I wonder will he answer? Part of the problem of a corrupt public process is that there is no accountability. Asking advisers to account is a good start!

Have you given advice and been paid for it, Property Gal?

No more debt? No more lending!

The contraction is literally awful to see. All the little service industries built upon consumer conceit and banksters deceit will shrivel and dry and be blown by the winter winds. Celebrity chefs? Eating out will return to being a luxury. Fewer ulcers from bacterial infection!

Saturn rules now! Cast a very weary, bleary eye on every investment opportunity. Reverse all the rules we learned over the last forty years. The signs were there and the path is known. What happened in the thirties? And the forties? Ahh, stimulation by warfare! A war on a noun, any noun! Drugs, Terror, terra, carbon. Choose one, choose them all!

Human folly. Twill be done very slowly as if in Japan, and twill be very thorough, and twill last until people spit into the dust when someone asks does it make sense to invest in a bigger house!

The division of the voters is a political stroke! The taxation issues will be dealt with in due course. They are making good use of a crisis, albeit one they prepared earlier!

That is, to get this virtuous interaction between public and private sector - where a high quality public sector, is able to free up more and more resources within the private area, to compete and excel in the global marketplace. Countries like Ireland and Britain simply don’t have the economics know-how to build such a system. Countries like Ireland and Britain only have some dying corpse of capitalism to cling onto. That will be their downfall.

That sounds a bit daft and silly. It is a bit daft and silly. But I think you can get a picture of what I mean.

What was your advice to your minister at the time? Whydid you not resign?

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/18/clearing-up-this-mess/