“There is no economy without society, and social construction is everywhere. I part company with the post-modernists though, because life cannot be reduced to a text.” - ‘but all this [waves vaguely] is text paul, didn’t you know’?

Just kidding.

I have been thinking further about your initial post, and will pick you up on Mauss, but will save further posts for approriate threads.

To finish off in style, with Keynes for now:

“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.”

It’s not that long since people in Ireland knew cold and hunger. Lots of the old stock knew what it was like not to have a bob. Many of our great musicians came up to Dublin to broadcast on 2RN. If they got the trainfare they considered themselves lucky.
Fann tamaill agus feicimid.

Thanks for the 14th c reference. You have some unusual products on your economist shelf. Now if you want to think about how ‘rationally calculating man’ emerged, you could try The Gift, by Marcel Mauss. There are all sorts of reasons to give and to receive, and as the entertainment industry shows, the creation of the value of an object is as important as the creation of the object itself.
There is no economy without society, and social construction is everywhere. I part company with the post-modernists though, because life cannot be reduced to a text.

An American Friend

Excellent post. Lord Reith would be proud. You have succeeded in educating, enlightening and entertaining us all at the same time.

Your survey indicates that this blog presents more literary effusions than eruptions of economics. Even the rants have a literary quality that leaves their targets unscathed. And much of the economics is focused on matters that are beyond our ability to influence.

Mostly displacement activity to avoid confronting the issues that are within our power to address.

It was ever thus.

Ultimately metaphor and analogy are tools that can be used for different purposes e.g. to explain, persuade, mislead etc. Understanding how and why the toolbox is being used is very valuable.

(Hmm… now what’s my ulterior motive for using tool as a metaphor for a metaphor..)

Very well done!

I also suspect you enjoyed writing the post as much as I enjoyed reading it.

Best…L

I like the idea of changing our metaphors in order to change our understanding of what is to be done.

One suggestion: if any politician wants to use metaphors that will connect with the Irish people and inspire us about the future then I would recommend farming metaphors. We’re all mostly just 2-3 generations removed from the land after all.

Sowing the seeds of recovery and growth and all that. The (emotional) message: we have control over our destiny, there will be rewards for our hard work etc.

Though obviously avoiding any metaphors referring to Animal Farm (or the CAP)…

Hand of Susan Sontag on your shoulder, etc.

I tried to keep it short, but I missed a lot.

“haircut”, “burning bondholders”, “magic beans”, various games, including a lot of poker.

@ paul quigley

Have you (or the Dork if he’s reading), come across “Wynnere and Wastoure” (Winner and Waster), a 14th century alliterative poem discussing the vexed issue of who are the wealth creators and who the wealth destroyers? First economic poem I know.

http://www.soton.ac.uk/~wpwt/trans/winner/wintrans.htm (modern translation)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynnere_and_Wastoure

@ Jill

Thanks very much! I’m just a bloke who makes posts though. If I get too carried away I’ll just mess up.

I read it all the way through to the end hoping for a sign of entering calmer waters.

PS. To my horror you omitted the “haircut”. Maybe you are saving that one for your next post. The big boys make profits all right but they don’t do losses, just haircuts!

Like Barry Eichengreen, I think the situation is more like the imposition of reparations on a defeated state. So Keynes’s denunciation of the Versailles Treaty naturally comes to mind. The question is how to respond? As Keynes’s critics pointed out, Germany imposed a heavy reparations burden on France after the 1870 war. The French simply knuckled down and paid it off showing that, even under the gold standard, it could be done. Arguably that’s Ireland’s best course. If we want our sovereignty back from the pawnshop (another useful metaphor) then we must scrimp and save until we can redeem it. The alternative is to smash the pawnshop window and take it back. Aside from any moral scruples we may have, that’s a risky course.

I don’t think the imagery of conflict is inappropriate. But the metaphor that comes to mind most frequently is that of a chess game and one adage in particular: in a bad position all the moves look bad, even the best.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13914118

I suppose when austerity bites, one has to look at every opportunity to look after number one.

On me ‘ead son but don’t move those goalposts.

Indeed, ‘all the world’s a stage’ and, as you have just evoked, so too is the Irish Economy, and a virtual one at that.

You have the rotating Director’s chair with selected script: each edition hopefully taking shape through the learned improvisation of the regular cast - ‘scholar, student, polemicist, pragmatist, pessimist, comic libertine, and of course, the curious. Frequented by some Cameo performance, with the running Extras, toying with their own take and sometimes requiring redirection.

In the audience are bureaucrats, reporters… and the rest, I imagine, attentive, pensive, hopeful, and entertained at times by the black humour ie. “Venus flytrap eating a spider video” brilliant!

So a metaphor for the blog itself?
‘Waiting for Godot…and the Irish Economy’.

Exit.

May you live in interesting times.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/my-confession/

“Anyone who has lived through political campaigns in recent Chinese history knows this much about the confession culture: solving a “problem” has little if anything to do with actual repentance or admission of guilt. So long as the underlying problem remains, no number of “confessions” changes anything. And once the underlying problem is solved, the lack of a confession never stands in the way. During the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, many Chinese scientists, including me, had to hand in confessions every day, and each confession was supposed to show “new” and “deeper” introspection on what we had found wrong in ourselves. One method we used in handling this demand was to spend a half-hour copying what we had written the day before (or maybe the day before that) while simply jumbling the order of the paragraphs. We would copy paragraphs A, B, C, and D but put them in the order C, B, D, A. This was enough to serve as our “new” introspection. We later learned that even the reordering had been unnecessary because the authorities, who were living in their own ruts, were not reading what we wrote anyway.

In short, “confessions” in this culture are formalities. They have more to do with face than with actual negotiations. The confession that Deng Xiaoping presented to Mao Zedong is a famous example. In early 1970, when Deng learned that Mao was considering whether to exonerate him, allowing him to return to power, Deng quickly wrote a “guarantee to Chairman Mao” in which he vowed “never to reverse course.” This letter gave Mao face to do what in any case he was inclined to do.”

That’s quite a discourse. I like the one about going round to hit the iceberg twice too.

‘If the economy really is like the weather, subject to chaos theory, then all the computing power in the world won’t be enough to make absolutely beneficial decisions, even within a clear framework such as social democracy’

Yes, there are inherent systemic complexities and linkages which defy rational planning, but most of the decisional ‘errors’ are driven by much more mundane matters like conflicts of interest. The economy is a Darwinian process in many respects.

Orthodox economics enjoys the status, and the income, which it does, because it has colluded with private wealth and state power in concealing nasty poltical and institutional realities. That is to say, it has allowed itself to be used as a tool for presenting transfers of wealth from one group to another, as ‘natural’, inevitable processes.

Given the messy outcomes which ensue, a lot of the technical literature has little application, other than to demonstrate mathematical and analytical gymnastics. Meanwhile lobbying and insider activity remain respected and respectable activities, even when breaches of law are involved. While there are many fine ‘independent’ operators, such as Ynes Smith (NY), or Bill Mitchell (Australia), economic institutions are so dependent on corporate support that critiical, ethical voices are muted.

The DoC’s analogy about Ireland serving the predatory appetites of the MNCs is a powerful one. The crisis in property, the banks, the trade unions and the public sector is at least acknowledged as ‘our problem’, but the financial transactions in the ‘furren’ sector are out of bounds to natives. Our elecetd leaders seem to take the beningn view that such matters are best left to those who know these things. That’s touching.

Many Irish professionals have a deep private involvement, of course, but their discourse seems not to extend beyond the walls of the (globally mobile) firm or the local service provider. Academics are not encouraged to look too closely at these arrangements. Money talks, but not in the way everyone else does.

I do recognise that there are over 100k jobs, which are gold dust in these times, plus a good deal of corpo tax. Given our experiences in the other sectors, What worries me is that we will start hearing the facts about transfer pricing just as the MNC investment wave is moving on elsewhere. When it is too late to make a difference.

or should it be ‘pillar’?

Come on the Irish Honey Bee!

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0512/1224296752943.html

As well as believing everything I read in the papers, I talk to my local butcher who is a bee keeper, and his latest hives are doing well after a tough few years.

PS. The Irish honey bee is no more immune to CCD than any other species. Our island status has just delayed its arrival. The last winter was very bad. You may, eh, want to revisit your metaphor…