More words than numbers

It's light on economics, but David McWiliams' book is a pacey read, with enough social and anthropological analysis, entertainment, irreverence and attitude to keep the reader engaged. Reviewed by economist Jim O'Leary

This is a book about change, the extraordinarily rapid and far-reaching social and economic change that has occurred in this country since the late 1980s. It is a book that holds up a mirror to that change, reflects it, describes it, dramatises it and, for the most part, celebrates it. It conveys in a remarkable way the drive, the energy and the pace of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as well as the dislocation and the congestion. It paints a picture of an economy hurtling through a transitionary stage of development, a society in fundamental disequilibrium, though not explicitly described as such.

It is not a book for those who want desiccated analysis. David McWilliams doesn't do desiccated analysis. He has long since transcended the narrow and inhospitable paths of scientific rigour. He is unencumbered by anything as limiting as an analytical framework. He is a lateral rather than linear thinker. There is no sense in this book of a theory being formulated, tested and rejected or accepted. What is offered is much more like a piece of art: a big canvas in vivid colours painted with great 'brio'.

Although McWilliams is an economist and the subject of the book is ostensibly the Irish economy, this is not primarily an economics book. Granted, it is not without economics content and certain economic phenomena are ascribed a central role in driving the change that the author is fascinated by. Ireland's decision to join the EMS in 1979, for example, is cited as a watershed from which flowed the historically low interest rates and the credit explosion of recent years. Likewise the economic role of the generation born in the 1970s, the eponymous Pope's Children, is given a certain prominence.

That said, this is much more a book of social or anthropological commentary, a good deal of it amusingly if not always acutely observed. He sees contemporary Ireland as comprising two (middle) classes: Decklanders, so named because of their obsession with timber decking, and HiCos, people whose political and cultural reference points are a fusion of the Hibernian and the Cosmopolitan. Both are doing well 'making out like bandits', to use the argot of the book, but Decklanders are boorish while HiCos are cultivated. HiCos watch TG4, while Decklanders watch TV3. HiCos travel, while Decklanders go on holidays. The distinction? Well, it's this:

"Going on holidays implies that you are captured, tethered to some sort of existence that is not you. People who take holidays are wage slaves who live in two distinct worlds'the work world and the holiday world'. For the HiCo, no such distinction exists. Travelling is an extension of their personalities."

I'm not convinced that this particular distinction has any great explanatory power, but it's clever and amusing. There is plenty of equally witty and entertaining stuff in similar vein. For example, there is a species that McWilliams dubs the "Protestant Catholics", lapsed Catholics who in middle age have rediscovered the attractions of religious observance but whose desire for status and exclusivity has them tip-toeing to Church of Ireland services rather than back to mass. Indeed, for McWilliams, the search for status, the aspiration to be "not merely rich but posh as well", is central to understanding a good deal of consumer behaviour in the new Ireland. I don't suppose that his thinking is especially novel in this respect, but the way he writes it up is.

Above everything else, McWilliams is a wordsmith. He plunges words into the white heat of his imagination and bends them into new and wonderful shapes and combinations. There's hardly a page of the book that doesn't throw up some verbal innovation, some new and improbable marriage of nouns: 'Wonderbra Economics'; 'the Expectocracy', 'the Attainometer'; 'Speed Bump Moms'; 'Property Porn'; 'the Kells Angels'; 'Destiny's Child'; 'Keanonomics'. One can't help admiring the inventiveness, although the cause of euphony is not always well served. The mid-Atlantic-type dialect that McWilliams claims has become the lingua franca of Irish teenagers "you know the speech pattern that uses the words 'like' and 'so' as if they were punctuation marks" he calls Malahidealect. Ugh!

More seriously, one has the uneasy feeling that some of the time at least, the catchy label is thought up first and the reality that it is supposed to describe is then beaten into submission. Often, the result is caricature. Sometimes the book teeters over the edge into a kind of cartoon-strip inhabited by trash fiction characters like 'Breakfast Roll Man' who works on the buildings, takes home €45,000 a year, beds eighteen-year-olds in Ratoath and lives on a diet of beer, panadol and chicken in a bap, and 'RoboPaddy', a sweaty, grubby, highly indebted property investor who haunts international airports in a tightly-fitting acrylic Celtic jersey.

Does this book have a message? According to the dustflap, it is intended as 'an antidote to the endless pessimism of the Commentariat, official Ireland's gloomy opinion mongers, forever seeing a glass half-empty that is in fact three-quarters full'. The self-declared purpose of the book is to tell "the real story" which is that 'there is a vast surge of ambition, new money, optimism and hope out there'. It certainly tells this story and tells it with style, as the dustflap boasts. It captures the surge of ambition and the optimism wonderfully well and provides plenty of colourful testimony to the vast quantum of new money that's sloshing around the place.

But, does it convince the reader that he or she should share the optimism? I don't think so. And the reason is that McWilliams, for all that he seems in thrall to the pumped-up full-on no-holds-barred materialism of contemporary Ireland, has enough of the dismal scientist left in him to betray more than a dollop of scepticism. His discussion of the property market, for example, suggests that we are in the fifth stage of Kindelberger's seven-stage boom-bust cycle, in other words that we are well advanced on the road towards a price collapse. He maintains that our eating habits have us irreversibly launched on a trajectory whose endpoint is a national diabetes pandemic. In reference to Chinese immigrants, he concludes cheerlessly: 'We are cannibalising ourselves by educating and hosting the very people who will eventually take our jobs'. And how about this for a glass-is-three-quarters-full take on traffic conditions: 'Every morning and every evening, traffic snakes around the arteries of this country, bumper to bumper, snarling, fuming, crashing and maiming'. And there's plenty more in that vein.

Should you buy this book? By all means. It is bright, pacy, clever and entertaining, irreverent and full of attitude – not unlike the people it observes. It's like Tom Wolfe and Ralph Steadman meet the Celtic Tiger. But, the guys in the ESRI can rest easy. Their place in the scheme of things is not under threat.

Jim O'Leary lectures in economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@nuim.ie