What life will be like for a middle class family in 2050 is still the most read and emailed article on the Irish Times website as I write this, more than 24 hours after it was published. I've gotten some really smart emails from readers interested in what it had to say. Some more interesting comments on the article, and my reaction to them, are below.
1. "Irish people have enjoyed relatively low population densities." Because of our low population density it has made it difficult economically for the government to provide infrastructure and social services to the population. Secondly it increase or oil dependence as people have to travel more. It would be far better for us if the country lived in more concentrate areas.
2."transition from oil dependent energy" I agree but im not sure about the timescale every energy age comes to a end rather quickly. The change from coal to oil took about a quarter of a century. So i would say the transfer to a mix of nuclear and renewable will happen fairly suddenly.
3. 8 million people our infrastructure can't cope with 4.2. Looking back on the past on irish economic history its hard to put much faith into any politicians that would take the hard decision to improve our infrastructure. Plus the problems of multi culturalism, irish people have yet to be seriously changed with living with diversity. In Dublin we are beginning to get ghettos. Hardly fairs well for race relations in 2050.
How do you propose to encourage the middle class to save more for the future? Keynes never had children but Sweden practiced Keynesian demand management before keyens wrote general theory and came through the thirties much better than most countries. Which shows that small countries can come up with bright ideas.
P.S. i think its quite ironic that the Jim Kemmy(formally socialist indepdent TD) school that you should be talking about middle class family life.
and my reaction:
1. We do enjoy low population densities, because with a large population comes the problem of dealing with and feeding masses of people. Holland is a case in point. Malthus said if the dutch were put into Ireland, they would feed the world, and if the Irish were put into Holland, they would starve.
2. This may be true, but don't forget in all previous case studies we were looking at a single country or at least an empire. Now we're talking about an entire global infrastructure. Also, our dependency on coal hasn't eased off---it's increased over the years due to population increases.
3. I didn't address this issue, because in 2 generations, many of the teething problems we see in Irish society dealing with new arrivals will be gone---they will be Irish people, as integrated into society as we let them become. It's up to us to encourage them.
4. We encourage people to save the same way we encourage anyone to do anything: provide incentives in the form of government backed securities people buy into. The SSIA scheme is a case in point.
5. Sweden had a nice time of it in the 1930's, and they did have some good ideas, but don't forget the backstory which is crucial: in an international atmosphere to protection and throttled trade, Sweden had a social democratic party (elected after neoclassical-style wage dropping policies caused riots in the streets and some killings) which took workers and gave them public works jobs with borrowed money. But, Sweden was a resource rich economy which could do these things in large scale. I don't think the Swedish story can be transplanted elsewhere. But yes, it was a good idea at the time.
I don't find it ironic at all to be from the Kemmy Business School talking about the middle class. Kemmy was a worker and a socialist, but he was a forward-looking guy. He held forward views on introducing women in the workforce 30 years before it became politically or socially acceptable, he was all for entering the EU, and he was a champion for Limerick, at least, in bringing business to Limerick at a time when people wouldn't come here. He was also a self-educated scholar, editing the Limerick Journal for many years until his death.