Posts from — September 2009

I’m pitching this to the SFA as a cautionary tale of modern-day snake oil.

Edit: Screw it – have it free via Youtube. If you like it, I have a special offer on great advice on your Twitter account for a mere €500 per half-hour….

Further Edit: Between here and Youtube, this video has now been viewed more than 25,000 times since Thursday. Holy crap.

There’s a bunch of students in Limerick wondering where in hell their lecturer is right now.

It’s all part of the lesson. Students have such a limited perspective – they should really be asking where he’ll be in 2050.

A copy of Stephen Kinsella’s new book Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living dropped in my letterbox over the weekend, and is, unlike many literary contributions by economists, immensely readable. After starting night, I found myself half way through it before going to sleep, which marks it out as accessible to all. I’m an interested layman at best when it comes to economics, and at the half-way point, I can say, hand on heart, that at no stage was I out of my depth. You won’t feel the need to know your GDP from your GNP from your GNI, and Ireland’s current vegetative economic state is laid out in very understandable terms.

Kinsella, an economics lecturer in UL, and a former classmate of mine at CBC Monkstown, is all over the airwaves today pimping the new book. Liberties Press offered a raft of bloggers review copies, which is how I received mine.

His timely ‘history of the future’ avoids painting a hoverboards-and-Robot-Monkey-Butler picture of what life will be like. Kinsella doesn’t expect all that much to change, although electric cars and highly-integrated mobile phone technology do feature regularly in the lives of the Murphys, our fictional family who guide us through the year 2050.

Snippets of their lives in the future punctuate the tale of where that imagined reality originated – the here and now of 2009. That here and now is a terrifying place, and Kinsella picks out some select stats to illustrate this. The Irish collectively spend 1.3billion hours watching television every year. (He points out that if just one per cent of US TV watchers redirected that time productively, they could build Wikipedia from scratch once every three and a half days). Our brains are addled with information overload as the streams of media vying for our attention proliferate. Our health system means our life expectancy is 14 years lower now than what it might be in 2050 (although, Kinsella predicts, the public/private divide in healthcare will be as large as ever). And we’re killing the planet, obviously.

In 2050, NAMA will only just have been wound up. Ireland will be a humid country, prone to flooding and a net exporter of coffee. We will be overwhelmingly elderly, as people choose to have children later, if at all.

Along the way, Kinsella posits suggestions as to how we could prevent some of the calamities and lay the foundations for some solid development. I agree with his call to scrap the Leaving Cert and start again with how we measure aptitude and intelligence. A supertanker port off the west coast makes sense too, orienting our international ties across the Atlantic. His views on nuclear power might be less popular.

I don’t usually review books at the halfway stage, but seeing as how Stephen has seen fit to predict happenings 40 years in advance, I’m sure I’ll be excused predicting that the second 104 pages will be as engaging as the first. If you see a copy, pick it up.

This is where I’ll be on Sunday. Blogging has been light as I’m up to my ears in work. Tweets are about all I can manage.