I confess, dear reader, that I do not know David McWilliams at all. On the two or three occasions on which we have met (as a guest at Leviathan, the entertaining political caberet night he used to host), he has behaved exactly in accordance with his public image – charming, dapper, and clearly very intelligent. He clearly has a way with words, having made a career out of identifying and labelling emerging social and economic trends in the country that we all call home – he is the author of phrases like “Breakfast Roll man”, and books like “The Pope’s Children”, referring to a category of celtic tiger voter and the generation that came of age in the early 1980s, respectively. After the 2008 crash, his reputation was enhanced because to his credit, he was one of the few economists who had publicly expressed skepticism of the celtic tiger.
That said, David does have a knack for declaring that it’s now time to talk about things that others have been talking about for years. Here he is, starting a conversation in the Irish Times over the weekend:
Demography is destiny. The single most important statistic in any developed economy is the population size. When planning for the future, the most critical forecast concerns the number of people in the country, their age and where do they live. Everything flows from that: housing, roads, rail links, hospitals, schools, water infrastructure, power grids, police resources – basically everything that a government should oversee will depend on the number of people.
So far, you’d have to say, so obvious. He goes on:
More people demand more services and each new citizen multiplies the pressure on already strained systems. Most of us who have suffered Dublin’s rush-hour gridlock, or the daily congestion choking Cork and Galway, will surely be asking the obvious question: if our transport infrastructure is buckling under today’s population of five million, how will it cope with seven million?
I will make the point here that the Irish Times apparently considered these very simple, and entirely obvious, ideas, as being revelatory enough to warrant publication in Ireland’s paper of record. The ideas that there might be capacity constraints on public services, or that demand might impact supply – ideas that second level students who choose economics literally learn at age 15 – are now important and new enough to warrant a major intervention in the country’s leading newspaper (in terms of influence, if not sales).
Here’s the point I am making: David McWilliams is a very smart and intelligent commentator whose qualifications in economics go well beyond those which you learn in secondary school on literally day one of leaving certificate economics. He has not been required to think, or tax his intellectual capacity, to come to the conclusions that he set out over the weekend.
The economic facts around immigration have not changed. The only thing that has changed is that David McWilliams now feels safe enough to acknowledge those facts in public. This is not really a column about immigration at all – it is a column which has one purpose and one alone: To signal to middle Ireland that it is now politically and culturally safe to acknowledge basic reality.
The necessity and value of this should not necessarily be under-stated, of course, given the amount of time in Ireland during which acknowledging basic economic reality about the impact of migration on public services and demand for housing was the kind of thing confined only to “the far right”, and that to do so assigned one as a member or at least sympathiser of that ideology. That this insanity appears to be abating is a good thing, even if the manner of it remains comically ludicrous.
Of course, there is a vast gulf between allowing economic reality to be debate in public – something my opposite number in the Irish Times now assents to – and living in a country that intends to actually take any action to address the economic reality that can be freely discussed. In this regard, McWilliams’ column was staggeringly light on any analysis of the Programme for Government, which essentially commits the country to the same supply-led approach to this issue that has gotten us into the mess in the first place: Tens of billions are to be committed over the next decade to “building” and “investment”, but the programme for government commits to hardly any additional spending on border security or reducing immigration.
Indeed, something that David did not mention in his piece is another basic economic point that will be familiar to leaving cert students: That demand expands to meet supply.
That is to say, for those of you who didn’t take economics, that as Apple makes more Ipads, all that happens is that more people decide that they will buy an Ipad. This is the reason that prestige brands are very careful to limit supply: The exclusivity of the Ferrari is that the company limits the number it makes. One of the reasons that so many people mourned this over the weekend is that only 1,311 Ferrari F-40s were ever built. Even if you can afford one, you probably can’t get it.
That clearly does not apply to public services: As the Government provides more services, more people will be attracted here to use them, so long as the services are relatively better than those in their home countries.
Our entire model of Governance is built around incentivising immigration, rather than deterring it. McWilliams got the easy bit right. It might be a few more years before he feels safe enough to say the next bit out loud.