Political Footballs of Our Time #1: Education

I’ve just caught a few minutes of the Vincent Browne show, which is a good deal more time than I ever want to give to a man who sounds like my great aunt after one sherry too many. This evening, Vincent and his merry men were considering the Green party’s latest bid to look like they have a backbone.

It’s funny, watching the Greens and Fianna Fail park their wagons around the campfire while the wild Fine Gaelers, Labour and the rest roar. Let’s be clear, at this point, every Irish person with any possessions at all is guarding them more closely than Gollum and his precious. Looking at our elected leaders, one is tempted to employ the line ‘from my cold, dead fingers’ when it comes to power. Or, more likely: ‘Once I’ve got my green card sorted’.

So, for anyone reading this outside of Ireland, the Green party has won some important concessions from Fianna Fail, their coalition partner, which will allow them to remain in government with a clear conscience. In the language of headlines, this means two things: a carbon tax and no reintroduction of college fees. If anything ever illustrated the extent to which political apathy and class is endemic in Ireland, it was this. In Ireland, Fine Gael & Fianna Fail are basically the same party with different accents. Labour is the guy, who when confronted with the sight of a burning house, demands to check each fireman’s bona fides before they touch a hose. Sinn Fein tell everyone what they want to hear, safe in the knowledge that they never have to actually act on their promises (yet…). Libertas, bless them, are what would emerge if PG Wodehouse was writing about Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts right now.

The Greens were the party you settled for, since you couldn’t vote Lib Dem. They never really stood for anything, other than being green, which is fine, if you’re on a county council, but quite another thing when you’re running a country. Nevertheless, plenty of people thought they might be worth a punt, or at least weren’t Sinn Fein, so off they went. With nary a backward glance at the lessons of history (au revoir, Progressive Democrats), they courageously took two ministerial posts in Brian Cowen’s government. Then, rather unfairly, time chose not to stand still.

So.

In the local elections, predictably, Fine Gael and Labour cleaned up. Just as predictably, Fianna Fail and the Greens were routed. Fianna Fail is very big, and can absorb this sort of thing. The Greens are not, and looked pretty rattled for a while. Of course, as both parties reminded us – this was not a referendum on the government. Heavens, no.

Either way, it was pretty clear that come a general election, Fianna Fail was going to take a heavy hit, perhaps enough to cause one of its rare breaks from power, while the Greens would be the latest recipient of the coalition partner booby prize.

At the same time, we were all trying to figure out what to do about this fine recession we’re having, And by we, I mean Brian Lenihan, and by figure out, I mean he asked the bankers what they would like for Christmas:

“I’ll have a get out of jail free card, please Minister! And if you could see your way to throwing in an ‘oul bonus – the eldest is getting married in the Ritz Carlton and those school fees won’t pay themselves, sure you know how it is.”

Good old Brian decided to put us (and the next seventeen generations) in debt for the rest of our natural lives, based on what intellectual lightweights like Joseph Stiglitz called a “massive transfer of money from the public to bankers”. He used some other words, like “squandering”, “nonsense” and “criminal”, but he can’t have meant them pejoratively, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, over in Iceland (I do have a point, eventually), things are pretty grim. Huge budget deficits, bank insolvency, a mutinous populace, and lots of other bad things combine to make the island look very desperate indeed. But, if you compare them to us, the differences are not so great. Indeed, there are many who believe that Iceland’s early bath will prove to be helpful in the long run.

In Ireland, we chose to hide under the blanket. As we did so, things continued to get worse, and they real bottom, when we finally hit it, will be much lower. The Greens obviously asked good old Brian for advice, because delaying the inevitable, as they have just done will only make their pain all the worse. Barring divine providence, which to be fair, usually did right by Bertie, the Greens will be decimated. It’ll be an election that even Enda could win.

- I’d meant to write something funny and non-political, but it’s hard to avoid fish so obviously in a barrel.

- As a by-the-by: the reintroduction of fees is not a bad idea. What is much, much worse is the lack of finance and attention at primary and second-level education. Pay for kids to go to college, if they can’t afford it. Not to boost enrolments at private secondary schools. Expand and fund the public school sector; teach children well from an early age; invest in special needs education. Then you’ll have a ‘smart economy’, not a collection of smart arses with visa-stamped passports.

- Gosh. I seem to have a bit of an opinion on this. Terribly sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I think it’s a touch of sobriety. Won’t happen again.

Zooming past

Late, late for a very important date, etc, but here's something that's both funny and interesting, which should really be all you need to read anything. As a bonus, it's a comic. After spending an evening watching RTE's coverage of our flatlining economy and the ongoing abuse scandals of certain religious orders, I'm beginning to think that we underestimate the value of humour at our peril.

Anyway, here you go. Enjoy.

Part 3 of Sydney Padua's Babbage & Lovelace.

And if that has sparked your interest in the economy, I suggest you pick up a copy of Fool's Gold, by the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett. It's a good step-by-step timeline of the factors, decisions and people who directly or indirectly contributed to the current crisis.

Don't look at me like that. It's interesting stuff, and important too. If you hadn't spotted how necessary it is to look around at what's going on outside your back yard yet, then there's no hope for you. As a corollary, if anyone has a time machine, I'd really appreciate if they could pop back to around 2002 and tell me to get my head out of my navel. Cheers.

If you must be entertained, try this. It's the latest from Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill, and Amazon doesn't seem to want to deliver it to me for some reason that escapes me. Perhaps I'm too old for funny books. Do go and read the rest of the series first, won't you?

Also, Star Trek. I've seen it twice, and I never go anywhere. If you see any shreds of my credibility, try and grab them before they can get away.

Financial Wizards and Fantasy Governments

Malcolm Gladwell’s just published a new article in The New Yorker on the theme of David and Goliath, which I think is worth a read. Especially so for Ireland, due to what it has to say about how you succeed when the odds are stacked against you, which no-one can deny is the case for us at the moment.

Gladwell uses two key models to illustrate his points: basketball, specifically the unlikely success of a teenage girls team in California, and the equally unexpected victories of T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouins in 1917. In both cases his examples should have lost – the basketball team were less skilled than almost all their opponents and the Bedouins were much fewer in number and untrained in comparison to the Turks. But they didn’t lose, because they did something that should be obvious, yet isn’t: they chose not to play by the accepted rules of the day. Now, that sounds both obvious and a preamble to another terrible U2 profile, but it doesn’t seem to have been so.

I’m going to use another model, writing and writers, to help me explain what I think is interesting about it. When we think of underdogs, we fundamentally misunderstand what the term means, romanticising the wrong things and downplaying more relevant information. J. K. Rowling is one of the most noted ‘overnight successes’ of the last 10 years, but every profile and interview misconstrues what she represents. The standard narrative runs thus: single mum in Edinburgh has eureka moment when she invents an orphaned wizard called Harry on a train journey, then writes the manuscript over cold tea in local coffee shop. A few foolish publishers had their Decca (the label that famously turned down The Beatles) moment, until the agent Christopher Little plucked it our of the slush pile, sold it to Bloomsbury and the rest is muti-million pound royalties and castles in Scotland.

This is fine as far as it goes, and has galvanized many hopeful writers of future bestsellers, but it’s not, strictly speaking, the whole truth. The reality for novelists, whether for adults or children, crime, fantasy, SF, literary, romance or thriller, is that there is no money in it. A typical advance for a first-time novelist is €3000. An advance is all you will have until you ‘earn out’ meaning the royalties that you have notionally accumulated rise above the advance amount. Essentially, an advance is like being handed half of your monthly salary before you do your work with the other half dependent on whether or not your job is still there four weeks later. You may be able to sell foreign rights to your work, or movie rights, but there’s no guarantee that they will be even close to that advance. And that’s it. There’s no more.

Let’s say you took a year to write your novel – it took Rowling five years to produce the first Harry Potter, during which time she plotted the series in general terms and nailed all the odd details that captured the imagination. The average novel is 75,000 words long, so you wrote just under 1500 words a week. Perfectly do-able. That’s still €57.69 per week. You couldn’t get a mortgage in a war zone for that these days. If you earn out, you may start seeing a good return. Rowling did, after all – why not you too? But if you don’t, you may not even get another chance at the windmill. The publishing world is littered with the cautionary tales of mid-list novelists whose efforts went without promotion and sank without trace. A great number of big deals were announced during the boom years, but few ever made good on their financial promise. This is largely because most of those six-figure advances were given to books that, well-written or not, were sold on the basis that they were thematically as close as possible to Rowling or other bestselling authors.

If you go to any bookshop and look at the children’s section, you will see walls of books all aiming for the Potter market. Every second children’s book grabs for that elusive magic in the hope that the author will break out and become another Rowling. But when Harry Potter came out the landscape was very different. Apart from the acknowledged classics from Dahl, Tolkien, Blume, Lewis and Blyton, most fiction aimed at Rowling’s 10-14 (the initial presumptive range) was what we might call ‘issue-based’. If you are under 40, you will remember very clearly what this means: stories about real issues (teen pregnancy, abuse, homosexuality, divorce, coping with disability, etc), all rendered so real that you could feel the driving rain and itchy polyester school uniforms through the pages.

It was a worthy idea, borne of a desire to render the reality of a world in a way that would be acceptable to children and teenagers – or the idea of them that held sway in the minds of parents and social workers of the time – and blast the stereotypes of Blyton and the like out of the water. The only problem was that children didn’t actually want to read them. If only the authors had aimed older: the confessional stories of magazines like Now and Women’s Way show there is a frighteningly huge market for misery-lit. So Harry Potter arrived in a world where his only competition was twelve-year-olds coping with their parents divorce and where no-one had any financial expectations of success. Hindsight is handy for these sorts of things, but it was a no-brainer.

But this is not the same world that the descendants of Potter arrived in. Children’s books were hot properties, expected to do big business and now there was enormous competition for the same prize. Yet both the publishers and the authors expected that the rewards would grow exponentially. They didn’t.

In Ireland – and the world – we thought we could lend and borrow ever-increasing amounts of money. We assumed that because a house on street A sold for €1 million that (a) €1 million was the base value, which could only rise and (b), if we knocked down another house on that street and built a terrace of four townhouses in its place we could make €4 million. It didn’t work that way.

This is the essential point. We allow outliers like Rowling to distort (massively) our perception of the day-to-day reality of an entire industry. The average children’s writer earns the same as they did when Harry Potter first came on the scene, which is to say: not much, But because the story of her success is so compelling, the outsize nature of it is distorted and we see it as more logical and achievable than it really is. In drawing that analogy with Ireland, we can see two things. First, that for Rowling, substitute the big winners of the boom – developers like McNamara and Dunne. They made it big, so we thought we could, Every chancer building a townhouse in their back yard or grabbing a buy-to-let in Bulgaria was traveling the same journey to fame and fortune as the Ballsbridge barons, as far as they were concerned. They were only a couple of well-timed deals away from their own glowing profiles in the Irish press. So the likelihood of success was amped up in people’s minds at the expense of understanding the irrationality of the whole enterprise.

All the emphasis was placed on the success of these guys, but little on long-term considerations. It was endemic. This is why we have a beautiful road from here to Galway, but no train line from Cork to Mayo. Or why we had a ‘socialist’ taoiseach but couldn’t manage to address the educational needs of the poorest amongst us. Like the starry-eyed writer of the 500^th Harry Potter knockoff, we reached out for our philosopher’s stone (a detached Georgian with a sea view, thanks for asking) while all around us the floor collapsed.

If you want to succeed at anything, two things will be helpful: talent and luck. If you have those, life can be much easier. But there is one thing that no amount of wish-fulfilling will avoid. There is no success without hard work. It doesn’t happen. The problem with our government’s response (and indeed the banks) to the crash since the beginning is that they got lucky on the basis of hard work done by others, over many years and in many countries. They didn’t make it happen and had no idea what to do when it stopped, so we have been like the long-suffering wife of a gambling addict who swears blind that everything is fine and bills are paid, etc, until it’s far too late and now even the family silver has to be sold to pay the debts. I’m not convinced that any of the opposition currently sharpening their stand-up skills on the benches have any real strategies for the future, but at least they haven’t spent the last six months pretending that they can turn the tide with a fork.

the dangers of journalism, or why I love research

When Obama ascended to the US presidency in January 2009 (yes he was elected in November 2008, but GWB didn't go back to Texas until the inauguration), there were lots of 'death of satire' articles floating about the news. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show publicly mourned his impression of the Washington Cowboy and wondered where they would now find humour. As it happens, they found it in their competitors.

In the US, big media is very big. Print media is on the same downward slide as it is everywhere else - less people read newspapers anyway, most organisations botched their entry online, dissatisfaction with their response to the last decade, particularly homeland security and the Iraq war - but television news is another story. The best way to understand them is to imagine a cross between the Sun and a glossy lifestyle magazine. TV networks like CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg & CNN sell (as they feel they must) the most distilled version of the news and have all the access that they require to the corridors of power. But when they get in there, they ask not why decisions were made and what has resulted, but rather, what wallpaper they choose and how awesome it is to be a billionaire.

In the boom market, there were (of course) many who criticised that approach. But let's not kid ourselves - it was the minority. this last decade was the one that gave us Big Brother, Celebrity Insert Reality Show Name Here, Cribs, The Fabulous Life of... and so on. We could shuffle right up to the velvet rope, because the veneer of success was so easy to achieve. When you can look like a winner, you can start to feel like one too. The real cost of things gets lost and your perception of both your wealth and the distance you are from losing it starts to become very skewed. As you start to believe in what you see in the mirror, you ask less questions about how it's being held up and by who.

This is why we're in the mess we're in right now. Not because capitalism failed, or because globalisation is universally bad, nor can we blame GWB or his cronies. We fell asleep at the wheel. If you questioned the rollercoaster, you were a naive lefty. If you questioned the left, you were a rabid neocon. These were convenient labels, especially in Ireland, where every party was equally left, right and centrist. At a recent talk by Malcolm Gladwell, someone from the floor raised the question : 'how did this happen?' to which the afro'd one replied that it was a consequence of intellectual laziness.

How?

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner for economics, had been warning about the dangers of a crash for some time. He wasn't alone. Vince Cable in the UK, our own David McWilliams (full disclosure: I'm occasionally employed by that fellow), are notables among countless others. But who in Ireland did we listen to when warnings of a property bubble were aired? Esteemed economists who worked for the estate agencies and banks that most stood to gain from an improving market. This felt awfully close to scientists, employed by cigarette companies, telling the world that there was no link between their products and any ill-effects. Unless you could be too cool.

So all the signs were there. Why then, did we let things come to this pass? In Ireland, we're facing one of the most ridiculous budgets in years, which will profoundly affect everything about our country. We elected these people, these Galway tent cheerleaders, even though all the evidence shouted caution. Despite warnings that even after a decade of an unprecedented boom, little in the way of real infrastructure had been accomplished for this country, which would inevitably mean that we would be ill-prepared for any future problems, we voted in Bertie and his merry men. Who did we punish? The PD's, who allowed themselves to be manoeuvered into the whipping boy of Irish politics. Watching the Green party be even more inept and so comprehensively bullied, any languishing support so decidedly eroded, you develop a sort of respect for PD's (the last people in the Fianna Fail ejector seat).

Of course, you have no respect for these guys - but you don't have to. They don't need your respect. They'll get elected anyway. Watch how the media heat got turned off Bertie and where the money was from the moment he jumped ship and left Cowen to figure it all out. We are an electorate that has been bought and paid for in speed ramps and mortgage relief. Make sure your name is on short term local projects, or on a party level, small initiatives that make people think that they're saving money. Don't worry that it won't last long, or that you haven't dealt with the costs of the health service, or the iniquities of education. No-one will remember until after the election. If you don't quite make the grade, fret not. You can throw a bone at one of the other smaller parties, or better still, a few independents. All they want is a few extra traffic lights and they'll keep quiet for a few years.

It may well be that Fine Gael manage it this time round. But it won't be because they have a series of coherent policies, or are effecting a sea-change in Irish politics per se. It will entirely be about getting the only other party with anything approaching large enough numbers and support outside Dublin. But be in no doubt that whoever it is, as it stands now, you're just choosing between card sharps.

So what does that digression into a rant have to do with the beginning of the post? You may have seen this already - I've been meaning to write about this for a few weeks, but have a look at this:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
CNBC Financial Advice
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Stewart and The Daily Show found another target after all. CNBC was a big cheerleader for the boom. Everything was great, even when it wasn't, just as in Ireland, when we were buying duplexes in invented towns with no infrastructure for more than a house in a nice part of any good city in the US. Every property section was our Jim Cramer. For a while there, it seemed as though his entire extended family were in some way involved in Mexican waving the entire Irish economy.

What NBC did have was access. More so than any person on the street, and more than most print or online outlets, even many television networks, they could get close to the halls of power. It's something of a shame that when they got there all they did was open the doors and ask if sir needed anything else for the evening. The Daily Show never had that sort of access. Sir Allen Stanford would never have turned up for a Stewart grilling. Bush never did, either. What they did have was the motivation to research. It was digging for the facts, as they did above, that has made this comedy show one of the most respected news programmes in the western world, and one that nobody in the US media can ignore. The thing is, the facts aren't hard to find. It just requires that you care more about them than who is going to be America's next top model.

When you have a media outlet that cares more about how those at the top feel than what they do, have done or will do, you have film and music magazines that are extended advertisements for whichever company is selling something that month, interviewers who ask soon-to-be-exposed-as-Ponzi-schemers 'how it feels to be a billionaire', or even, national television stations that report a news story then apologise for doing so, because a politician's feelings may be hurt. When a 27-year old woman's decline from cancer is relayed through every possible medium, but we are afraid to poke fun at our leaders, or watch our watchmen, we're doing something wrong, surely?

Apologies for the long rant. Someone give me a column so I can work these personal problems out in a more public forum.

Old, old piece about economics. Abandon hope all ye who etc, etc.

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of working for one of Ireland's favourite 'Prophets of Doom' (if that's not crying out to be a rubbish indie band title I don't know what is) - certain idiosyncratic terminology will alert the careful reader as to which pundit it was. Towards the end of my service I had an idea about organic markets, niche(ish) companies like Apple, and the US company Whole Foods.

It was too late in the day for this to make the book. Actually, I have no idea if it did: I read numerous drafts during the editing process, but to date have not sat down with the published work. I doubt that there's any reference to it, though, which is why I am posting it here.

The following is me attempting to work out that idea w/r/t Ireland and keeping us out of what we all knew was coming. It's quite long, but I haven't spotted any readers on my blog yet, so I'm sure the yawning abyss of teh internets won't mind. Anyway, I'm thinking of returning to it with a view to making an article, so all you other unemployed journos - hands off.

Sad to say, I find this stuff desperately interesting, much more so than crafting the columns I posted last month, so I imagine there's no hope for me. Enjoy?

What are the advantages of an organic market? How does it work and attract customers?

1. Perception of extra value inherent in this food:

With the rise in awareness of how food reaches the end of our forks, equally the makeup of the customer shifts, so that we begin to think of food consumers as those who care (or have some interest) about what sort of food they eat and where it has come from; and those who don’t. Obviously, this is a middle-class issue for the most part – caring about your food on that level implies (or at least, this is usually the case) that you have the ability and financial wherewithal to make that choice without it collapsing your weekly/daily/monthly food budget. That said, the beginnings of most major trends are amongst the middle classes, from whence things trickle down and up. If organic food takes off among the middle classes, then prices will eventually drop as competition rises for the organic Euro and there will be a trickle down effect to the working classes. In addition, as the media is a middle class industry, the fashion towards organic food is advertised widely and fluently. All this allows organic food to enter the consumers vocabulary, and suddenly you find yourself at a dinner party where people know the difference between organic and free-range chickens and are prepared to spend 45 minutes discussing it, while you cower in your chair, hoping that no-one can tell that until this very moment that they have been eating a ‘Fresh’ (i.e., means nothing at all) chicken from Tesco’s for €4.99.

2. The sense that the customer is helping themselves and the earth:

If I buy organic food, I don’t just feel better about what I am eating, I feel better about myself. I am fattening my ego with every forkful of locally sourced rocket. I can say with some certainty that the animals who were killed to feed me had a reasonably good life, that my greens were grown in Ireland by farmers who weren’t using synthetic pesticides that may harm the long-term viability of the soil, and who paid their farmhands a fair wage. I can say that my bananas were sourced from a country that has a positive ethical record, and even the Mayan Gold Chocolate that is causing my fillings is grown from sustainable sources. Now, there are a lot of ‘if’s’ there, and not all organic food was created equal, as it were, but even if I am just buying the most cursorily ‘organic’ item, I automatically feel as though I have also bought a degree of food karma that separates me from the hordes at McDonalds. Whether or not a hardcore organic foodie would agree doesn’t matter, because I don’t know any, and in the same way that no-one who owns a copy of the Joshua Tree could really give a monkey’s about Niall Stokes’ claims that to be a true fan you probably had to have been at a gig in the Dandelion Market in August 1977 (or something), it doesn’t matter what a purist thinks, because they have been left out of the equation.


3. Use of organic food to tell others about who you are:

Food matters now in a way it didn’t before. It is a social hoop nowadays in a way that it wasn’t when we all had the same, Brussels sprout based cuisine way back when. More men are cooking now – Jamie Oliver & Gordon Ramsay have seen to that. More women are doing it for pleasure too – listen to the dinner party discussions about statuesque Nigella – and suddenly you look around and notice what and how people eat. It’s not everywhere, nor is it likely to be (at least in the same form: true organic, small-scale farming implies a smaller global populace – a hard proposition to swallow), but buying organic food is now another thing that you must do in order to fit in with the world, making it a prime Juggler objective.

4. How is organic food sold & marketed?

Traditionally, organic food has been sold at farmers markets and in some cases as part of a collective co-operative general market (with all the vaguely crusty connotations that implies). However, as we all know, the rise in awareness of its benefits, anti-processed food bestsellers like Fast Food Nation and new celebrity chefs mean that to be organic is no longer exclusively associated with that world, and so it is desirable. In Ireland, we have a few different varieties:

Farmers market:
This is the basic foodie market. There’s a well-known one in Temple Bar every Saturday, though it is gradually morphing into an outdoor food court. There are some in Dalkey, Dún Laoghaire and a few other places as well, I think. These tend to have a couple of vegetable suppliers and maybe a craft stall or two. They aren’t always comprehensive – you couldn’t do a full shop, necessarily – but they have nice stuff and have a reasonable audience. They do tend to be seasonal and this has a major effect on their custom as the stall that was there last week might spontaneously disappear to be replaced by six guys selling wooden toy substitutes.

Co-Operative Market:
This is the next step up, and probably the classic example of how this can be a successful long term enterprise. There’s one on Pearse Street, inside a school hall, every Saturday, which has run forever, it seems. In one of these, the customer ‘joins’ as a member for a period (usually a year is what’s offered, although you can come along and pay a daily rate of €2 or something to gain access). Inside, you’ll find something much closer to the normal idea of a supermarket, with stalls that sell most everything you might need (as long as you don’t eat meat). It is always packed. Customers range from students just back from their gap year in Nepal to D4 Dames and curious locals.

Whole Foods:
This is one of the major food chains in the USA. They don’t have an outlet here. In 2004 they had total sales of $4.6 billion. They are like Wal-Mart in that they are an aggressively expanding corporation who are now in the UK also (bought a chain called Fresh & Wild last year), and in being anti-union. Their big selling point is that they are organic. They have harnessed the organic market in the US and consolidated their position at the centre of it. In fact, a better comparison may be to Starbucks or Google, other growth-hungry companies with much vaunted ethical credentials. As with Apple, Whole Foods is noticeably more expensive than other supermarkets. Despite this, it has been exponentially successful, drawing more and more Americans through its doors. It should be pointed out that the industrialization of organic food by this company has not gone without comment. Detractors suggest that the laws governing what can be labeled ‘organic’ in the US are not consistent with what we, as customers, might deem organic. Equally, the company’s anti-union stance is understandably not a great hit with the traditionalist, though it is entirely consistent with its and America’s industry in general.

That all said, Whole Foods has managed to do something that it’s competitors have not managed, and which you can see in things like Tesco’s Finest range and how Superquinn presents itself in general.

Broadly speaking, the problem with modern life for many people is the anonymity of it. We don’t know how things get to us, whether it be the food on the end of our fork or indeed the fork itself. What organic food offers is the (perhaps pointless on occasion, but comforting) knowledge that our food came from somewhere, was made by someone, and with some attempt at craftsmanship and value. What a company like Whole Foods does is put that feeling into a biodegradable cardboard package and sells it in 191 locations all over the United States. It has cracked the code – taking what is good about the smalltime farmers market or co-op and puts that together with the wide distribution, marketing reach, the efficiency, of a giant multiple.

This is not now the most popular way to shop, and for many people it may never be, but it is gaining in popularity at the expense of those who would pile it high and sell it cheap. Tesco’s understands this dynamic, which is why if you walk into their poultry section you will see a clear hierarchy of shelving, with the expensive, traceable organic chicken at the top, then the slightly cheaper free-range compromise (like ‘diet organic’) at eye level. Below all this, in much greater quantities, you will find ‘fresh’ chicken (you could have great fun examining exactly what Tesco’s have to sell to call a chicken ‘fresh’). You’ll see the subtle changes in packaging between the types and you will have to admit that the supermarket is adept at having its cake and eating it.

In the new Grand Canal Dock development, on the quay side, you’ll see our very own Whole Foods: Fresh, set up by the property developer Simon Kelly (Thomas Read group). The first was set up in Smithfield at a cost of €15 million in 2006, according to the Business Post. It’s conceived (apparently) as a competitor for SuperValu and is supplied by BWG, who own the Spar franchise. But let me be the one to tell you that it bears about as much resemblance to Spar (or Supervalu/Centra/Mace) as I do to a cereal box. It’s filled with organic stuff, very expensively fitted out and extremely tasteful. It’s not cheap, neither. When I strolled in avec Sol last Saturday morning (searching for croissants & The Guardian, because I am a caricature), I found the temple of the Juggler. This, mind you, is a place for the successful Juggler, or at least the one who can look successful, It was very quiet, some tasteful jazz in the background, female marketing exec’s in asymmetrical jogging tops, early middle-aged fathers in parkas and trainers pushing their one angelic child (with de rigeur ringlets, whether boy or girl) around the organic cereal section, looking for the Coco Pops hidden at the back. Needless to say, I was awash in croissants of al shapes and sizes and had no trouble sourcing my fix of The Guardian. It was very clear that the customers were predominantly women – well over two thirds of the magazine rack was devoted to women’s interest publications, with a very lonely copy of Four Four Two looking like David Beckham at a lingerie party.


…….


Ultimately, what I see with these places is a mode of thinking which differs from the traditional retailer in one major respect: they are not selling merely the product, but the experience. Because of this, there is a sense of participation. If I buy an Apple iPod I feel in some peripheral way cooler and more networked into a world that I previously felt distant from. Equally, I might be a rubbish cook, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment when I buy all my food from organic suppliers. The fact that I could have bought an MP3 player for half the price or 6 TV dinners from Tesco instead and had more money doesn’t occur to me as a viable alternative, because I am not interested in those things. Whole Foods have sold me a version of myself that I much prefer to the one with five quid more in his pocket and a stomachache. I have decided that this food equals health in the same way that Apple equals a certain type of coolness to which I aspire. There are so many things that are sold this way nowadays. People are building using sustainable techniques, partly because on an intellectual level they appreciate the ethical argument and can see the long term economic benefits, but mainly because they love the houses they’ve seen on Grand Designs and want to keep up with the Duffy-McKenna’s. This is in a funny way, exactly why the Jugglers are what they are. They have grasped the American go-getting ideal with both hands, but in the main have not grabbed the necessary wallets.

The organic market gets you in the door because you want to be there, not because they have come out to collar you. They have done this by making what they have as appealing as possible and at the same time, educated you into understanding that there is a perfectly understandable financial cost for such an incredible experience. As you have mentioned, we’ll never keep Google in Dublin because of our amazingly low salary scales or our tropical weather. We will keep them by selling ourselves as the only logical place for a successful company of that nature to be in, from a strategic, emotional and cultural standpoint. It’s that same tactic that will attract the diaspora.

Economic-based rant, part 1

This is my first post. I'm a 'more part-time than I'd like' writer right now, but one of the regular gigs that I have is as a columnist for that august publication, Totally Dublin. That'd be Dublin, Ireland, geography fans.

It's fun, but occasionally I find myself wanting to write more than my word count, so one of the things that I'll be doing here is posting my columns from time to time, with some added bits if I think I haven't rambled enough. Hopefully it'll stay fairly interesting and avoid self-indulgence, but we'll see...

October's column is inspired largely by another recent job, working as a researcher for David McWilliams, an Irish economist who has just published a book called The Generation Game, which is catching a teeny bit of heat right now, mainly for suggesting that Ireland's boom might just possibly have a best before date.

Anyway, here's the column:

'The queues of frantic soon to be ex-customers are trailing out of branches of Northern Rock as I write this, with the British parliament desperately trying to calm everything down amid fears of an imminent recession. By the time you read this, the situation may be much worse, or if we are to remain with our governments interpretation of the affair, just grand, no bother at all, barely a storm in a teacup. Bertie says that all those people who are suggesting that the economy might be in less than the full flush of health ‘are not economists’ and that he wouldn’t trust them ‘with a dime going down the shop’. Rightly so. Do these comedians not realise that our currency is the Euro? Clearly, against the fearful intellectual might of Our Glorious Leader, charlatans like David McWilliams, Alan Greenspan and The Economist are naughty schoolboys secretly reading the Beano inside their economic textbooks, quaking in their shorts. Surely everyone is going to come to their senses now and go back to buying duplexes in Meath?

What’s that? Sub-Prime mortgages? Consolidated loans? Popular in America, you say? Sounds good. Nothing could possibly go wrong there. Oh. It did? Really? Collapse in financial markets, eh? Ah. Well. That could never happen here. We’d never dream of selling sub-prime mortgages to people who have no business with Monopoly money, let alone the real stuff. No, we’d never have people like Start, Springboard, Stepstone, Nua Homeloans or GE Money peddling that sort of financial product. I’m certain that these companies also would be in no way connected to some of the large US financial outfits that are on the sharp end of the subprime disaster on that continent right now, or some of the ones that have been getting a bad press in the UK at the moment. Names like Citicorp or GE Capital would never pop up, surely.

Whew. I’m glad that we don’t need to worry. Even if we did, Our Glorious Government have taken fabulous care of Ireland’s infrastructure in these prosperous years. We really have made hay while the sun shone. What with all the new hospitals and schools in the rapidly expanding commuter belts, the massive improvements to the public transport system and the roads all over the country. Not to mention broadband. I think we should all ignore that World Economic Forum report on how Ireland has a poorly developed and inefficient infrastructure, or all those tedious reports about healthcare and education shortcomings. They’re all just jealous.

Oh well. I’m sure nothing else could go wrong. We have all those lovely US multinationals like Intel, Apple and Google. Excuse me, I didn’t catch that. China?

Yes, I would be in no way worried about the fact that our biggest indigenous industry – the building and property market – is predicated on selling things to each other at ludicrous prices. Nor do I have any worries that all these other countries like China, India or even places like Poland or Romania would ever do something as ridiculous as undercut our invitingly low corporate tax. What’s in it for them? Anyway, it’s not as though they have substantially more people willing and able to do the same jobs for the multinationals that Irish people do now.

Yes, we’re very lucky to in such a rock-solid economy, run by such a clever government. We’ve got no worries at all. '

So, it's a little flippant, but that's the problem with columns generally. They're not really designed for detailed discussion of complex ideas, which is fine unless you're as pretentious as me. Then again, if you wanted a profound discussion of economic ideas, you probably wouldn't be reading Roisin Ingle, Julie Burchill, or god forbid, me.

Still, it's interesting to think about the issues that I'm trying to raise here. Ireland is in a different situation than it ever has been before. We do seem to have lots of money, and everyone is doing really well. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that everything's going to stay that way, let alone keep getting better.

There are several potential problems with the economy, it seems to me:

1. Our reliance on foreign multinationals. Before anybody confuses this for Indymedia, I'm not about to start ranting about globalisation. Or at least, not right now. What I am saying is that a large part of the reason that Ireland's boom has happened is attributable to our success in attracting large foreign corporations to our shores - Dell, Apple, Intel, Pfizer, Google, etc, etc. We succeeded in bringing these outfits here because we had a great sales pitch: an educated, English-speaking workforce, (relatively) cheap costs and most of all a very agreeable corporate tax rate.

In 1999, Ireland's corporate tax rate was 8%. To put that in context, the rate in the UK was 30% at that time. We could set our bar that low because we had nothing to lose - this was 8% more tax than we would have had otherwise, so it was in effect, free money. There was no way that the UK could compete with the underdog across the water, and by October 2004, Ireland was the most profitable country in the world for US investment. US companies, being clear-minded about the whole 'making money hand over fist' thing, came over and created lots of jobs, pouring lots of money into the economy.

So this is all great. We're all working in HR and driving our BMW's, thinking about Saturday's barbecues. Everything's just fantastic.

Along comes every other country that was in our position 15-20 years ago. Last year, a Swiss canton, Zug, set it's corporate tax rate to 6.6% (Ireland's at the time was 12.5%). Every country that watched our ascent from Europe's pauper to prince is going to copy this model, just as we are beginning to be unable to compete. Bulgaria's corporate tax rate is
10%. Expect this to continue, and as it does, watch one very compelling anchor to our economy get pulled.

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After writing all that, I think that it might be an idea to split this post, given that it's now over a thousand words.

So, whomever has read down this far: cheers, I hope it's been interesting. Do come back.

- thanks to FinFacts for all the hard data that I don't actually carry around in my head...