Apriorism

It says something for the fixation of so many at the Guardian for certain axioms that they often unwittingly parlay the rebuttal for the assertion they seek to demonstrate. In the guise of a piece on Ireland's economic boom, Angelique Chrisafis seeks to demonstrate yet again the Guardian axiom that liberal capitalism causes (or at least exacerbates) poverty.

Ms Chrisafis affects to be puzzled as to why "spending on social welfare is so low" here. It would be charitable to describe this as naivetee. However, this is a deliberate construction on her part to elide the fact that social welfare entitlements have not been cut at all. In fact, Irish Government policy has always been to at least match inflation indexing in "uprating" social welfare payments. The reason social welfare "spending" is "so low" is that the Irish unemployment level hovers around the 4% mark, (down from about 14% in the early 1990s) something which should have been obvious to anyone who had read...the first few paragraphs of Ms Chrisafis' piece!

Dan McLaughlin, the chief economist at the Bank of Ireland [..] said employment would rise by 50,000 a year and Ireland would have to lure workers from the EU's latest members in eastern Europe

The meme of "Those left behind by the Celtic Tiger" is so resilient that there is a ready audience for the claptrap served up here. It really is a wretched article which includes the obligatory reference to "the injustices of colonialism" and this pricelessly gauche sentence:

"Here the Celtic Tiger boom of the 90s roared its loudest and Dublin's newly rich stepped into the satin slippers of the old British colonial masters, taking over redbrick villas now worth millions"

It probably deserves more attention than I have been able to give but I would just note another thing: Ms Chrisafis scrupulously ignores measures of absolute poverty, redefining "the poor" as those who (officially*) earn less than 60% (60%!) of the average wage. An emphasis on relative poverty ought to be a sure sign that the person is more interested in achieving equality than prosperity, all the better to validate one's cherished left-wing ideals. If you are concerned, a priori, with reducing inequality there is a ready solution: Simply take all the money off those earning over 60% of the average wage - the "hedonistic rich" as she puts it - put it in a big container and set it on fire. Bingo: the "poor" become "rich" without receiving a single extra cent!

* There remains a significant "informal economy" here.

[Thanks to Abiola for pointing out the piece to me in the first place]

Comments

[Jon Ihle]

This sort of basic economic illiteracy crops up everywhere, like when reporters say the US consumes 25% of the world's energy without mentioning it produces 25% of the goods and wealth, too; or when they gasp that the US has a greater military expenditure than the next 10 top spenders combined without noting whether or not the spending levels are proportional to the relative sizes of their economies. The list goes on and on.

The other annoying thing about drawing conclusions based on absolute spending on social welfare is that it fails to consider the possible deleterious effects of higher spending - what is the net effect on all economic actors in a society if welfare spending increases? Is it a net good? Is it better to have high spending levels and 12% unemployment (France, Germany), or low spending and high employment (Ireland, UK, US)?

I like the bit about burning the money. Apt metaphor.

[Frank McGahon]

It doesn't take too much thought to realise that the first priority for those such as Chrisafis is to validate prior beliefs about inequality.

I thought that burning the money would be a more useful way of demonstrating the absurdity of the relative poverty notion. You can really muddy the point if you just redistribute it - it isn't instinctively obvious to many people the disastrous consequences of such an action but they do "get" the burnt banknotes.

[eoin]

Relative poverty could also be eliminated, of course, if we had 50% unemployment. Maybe that is what they want.