Latest Issue of The Economic and Social Review

The latest issue of The Economic and Social Review is available here.

5 replies on “Latest Issue of The Economic and Social Review”

The paper by Walsh & Walsh on suicide is a sobering read. It brings home, after the endless talk of banks and bondholders, the human cost of our catastrophic economic failure: a significant number of young and middle-age men are dead.

Interesting paper on Irish Households Coping with Mortgage Repayments.

The conclusions say “In particular, our summary statistics show that more highly burdened households tend to have heads of household who are younger, more often female and more highly educated than heads in households with lower mortgage burdens. More heavily burdened households also more often tend to be based in urban locations, have taken their mortgage out in recent years and face a longer mortgage term than households with a lower mortgage burden.”

I wonder if there might be any correlation with advertising or financial products targeting such demographic groups towards the end of the boom.

@Edmond – “I wonder if there might be any correlation with advertising or financial products targeting such demographic groups towards the end of the boom.”

That’s a very interesting question. As prices went up in the bubble, they needed to target people who could take on larger mortgages (or thought they could take them on). Having once worked for a credit card company I have absolutely no doubts about the cynical and destructive nature of financial services companies. I once heard one of their directors say, “we need to get more people into more debt.”

The Suicide paper is largely accurate for the period post 1990 but stats on suicide pre 1990 are not there.

In that era a Suicide could not be buried in church graveyard and strenous efforts were made to find an accidental element to ensure that the death was a misadventure. I am even aware of a distant family member who was thrown into the sea for a while AFTER the doctor had certified death by drowning.

Furthermore deaths attributable to suicide and alchohol were common in that era or has nobody ever heard of Poitín and its myriad effects ??

It would be timely to study the deliberate under reporting of excess mortality back in those days by speaking to the medical practitioners who went along with it.

They are generally retired GPs and over 75 years of age and there is not much timeelft to collect the accurate data. You will find one thing in common, which is that the wishes of the living were ever paramount in the diagnosis and certification.

Suicide is not new, only the accurate reporting of same!

2Pack: The paper has a careful discussion of the issue of unmeasured suicide. The series they use includes “Undetermined deaths” which would probably deal with most of the unrecorded suicides ‘though not your misfortunate relative.
One of the authors of the paper, Dermot Walsh, is a psychiatrist and would be very familiar with the issues you raise.

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