Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Books

Nuclear Power in Ireland

Here are some notes (google doc) from the talk I gave at NUI, Galway, yesterday. Thanks to the Lit and Deb society for inviting me down, and to Senator Boyle for the chance to debate with him. I learned a lot, I won, and it was a laugh. Of course I based a fair amount of [...]

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Confronting the Crisis: Clarifying Future Options

This is going to be well worth going to folks, organised by ISKS at UL.
Following on from the first ISKS conversation between Professor Ruth Levitas and Michael D. Higgins on transformative tools for a better Ireland, the second conversation focuses on the options now facing Irish society before what is likely to be the most [...]

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Telling Quote

Ridiculously busy today with deadlines, but here’s a quick quote from Prof. Joe Lee’s Ireland 1912-1985, p. 631, which I took from Michael O’Sullivan’s Ireland and the Global Question.

Small states must rely heavily on the quality of their strategic thinking to counter their vulnerability to international influences.

Think we’ve done that well, recently? The quote struck [...]

Financial Fragility and Corporate Governance in Ireland

Here’s a book chapter forthcoming (in edited version) in Corporate Governance in Ireland: An Irish Perspective, edited by Dr Ailbhe O’Neill of Trinity College, Dublin. Here’s the abstract, the link for the working paper version is below.

This chapter advances a financial fragility hypothesis[1] to explain many of the determinants of the 2009/2010 Irish recessionary period. [...]

Tagged

Laws of Chaos

Farjoun and Machover’s classic on Probabilistic Political Economy is now available for free download, you lucky sods. Just click the image below to get the .pdf. Thanks to Dr. Ian Wright for putting this up for everyone, it’s a pure public good.

EC4004 Lecture 5: Uncertainty

This is the second part of the course, where we look at strategic behaviour under uncertainty. Lectures one, two, three, and four were all about establishing the theory of demand under certain conditions. We don’t live in a world of certainty, but its exact opposite, so we must change the theory to account for the [...]

Tagged , , , , , ,

“It measures everything but that which makes life worth living”

Click below to watch Robert Kennedy talking about Gross National Product and its flaws, more than 40 years ago. EC4004 students should pay particular interest. It’s a lovely piece of film.

Via Economist’s View via via the other EV
Related articles

Looking at Ireland’s National Income, 2002-2007
Cooking GDP, Unemployment, and Inflation numbers
Celtic Tiger’s economy shrinks
Inflation Is 11.6% If Calculated [...]

Tagged , , , , , ,

Review: Robert Shiller’s Subprime Solution

Image via Wikipedia
I’ve just finished Robert Shiller’s Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about it.
The book is a short, sharp taste of Shiller’s trademark clarity as a writer, polemicist, and thinker, and he makes some interesting points.
First, he thinks the subprime meltdown had more to do with psychology [...]

Tagged , , , , , , ,