On the road to God knows where
It is said that Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel remarked recently that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. In fact, there are many reasons for suggesting that Ireland’s current difficulties provide an opportunity to re-consider our economy, our political habits and our society. People are generally willing to think more radically when the status quo isn’t working as well as it should. So we need to ask ourselves where we are going; and we need to use the debate prompted by that question to set out a vision. Armed with the vision, we are more likely to be willing to make sacrifices, and we are also more likely to be able to contribute to the process that will lead to our destination.
So far we haven’t done much of this. What’s going on right now is a kind of national firefighting, with teams of people pouring water over conflagrations here and there, and others running around shouting, and others again in shock looking at the charred remains of some of the fires that wouldn’t go out. You get the picture.
Much of the public commentary, and I think a good deal of the chatter at the bar over a pint, is about the Horrible Bankers. Without wanting to take away from the truly amazing story of what some of these good people apparently considered right and proper in conducting their business, at this point it’s a sideshow. Putting the men from the financial boardrooms in the stocks and throwing rotten tomatoes at them may be perfectly justifiable and even fun, but right now it doesn’t help us at all. We need to move beyond the firefighting and finger wagging and get to the vision thing. We need to know where we’re going next and how we’ll get there.
A few people have started making suggestions about a very different form of society and economy than the one that brought us the Celtic Tiger. Higher taxes (at least for the rich), public ownership of this and that, cast iron regulation of the other, are amongst the things on the menu. The Boston versus Berlin thing is also being resurrected, but it’s a little tricky because Berlin is also in a bit of chaos right now and Boston may, in the Obama era, be rather unlike Boston.
The serious point of this post is that when you want to recover from a crisis you need a strategy, not merely tactics. And the strategy requires a vision. And it may be time to suggest, gently, that cutting public expenditure is not a vision (even if it is right), and may not even be a tactic. Nor is raising taxes. Some of the big questions we need to be asking now include: who will be creating this country’s wealth in five years’ time? To what extent and in what way do we expect to distribute that wealth? As we keep talking about innovation, what kind of innovation do we want Ireland to be known for, and how can we harness that innovation to generate both growth and jobs?
Some of these questions are put and addressed in the Government’s plan, Building Ireland’s Smart Economy. But on the whole that document is too busy, and perhaps contains too many detailed ideas without setting it in the context of an overall vision. And most important of all, that vision, when we have it, needs to be communicated directly to the people.
Explore posts in the same categories: economy, politics, societyTags: crisis, public expenditure, taxation, vision, vision thing
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University Blog 
February 26, 2009 at 12:26 pm
It is a pleasure to read statements out of an American point of view. as a German, I hope American plans will work out, for the recovering of German economics is very much depended on American markets.