I’m not an economist, but…

You know when you look at a word, and suddenly it appears to be spelt wrongly? ‘Vendor’ is a classic. Somehow you’ve stepped outside the frame, and the obvious no longer appears right.

I just cast my eyes over a press release from an Irish political party that shall remain nameless, and realised, ‘either this is a poor translation from the Manchurian or I have been abroad for way too long…”

“More than 20,000 Meath residents are already forced to commute for hours every day because they cannot get jobs closer to home. Yet the Government has done nothing to counter the misery of commuters by providing better transport infrastructure, or by trying to bring jobs into the county.”

For the first time, that sounds really odd to me; the idea that it’s the government’s job to bring jobs into the county. Not the country, the county. Of course the government should have done (but didn’t) sensible urban planning, developed and then actually implemented a proper national transport plan, should create tax incentives, reward or perhaps mitigate entrepreneural risk-taking, provide a decent level of eduation, health and other ‘soft’ infrastructure etc. etc. But should its job be to ‘bring jobs into the county’? Specifically to Meath? (On a side point, I imagine many in Leitrim or Donegal envy Meath’s position as a commuter belt, but anyway.)

It seems a bizaarely passive expectation that says ‘we voted for you, now get the jobs in’. It’s not simply the value; pork= a human right, that slapped me sideways. It was the whining passivity that thinks of job-creation as something that happens in Dublin and is then passed around. Now I’m not so naive as to think people don’t vote at least in part for better or more economic opportunities. And I live in a city that devotes endless resources to the unstatesmanlike activity of divvying up moderately important agencies between mid-level European cities.

But I was surprised at the fatalism that still passes for political rhetoric in Ireland. Or maybe I just never noticed it before. Have I been exposed to too much hardball Anglo-Saxon market capitalism? Is the MBA finally shifting my politics to the right? Or does this sound equally weird to others?

Here’s some more:

“Yet the job creation record in Meath is appalling, and the county has been losing up to 50 IDA-supported jobs every year.”

The IDA is the state agency whose job is to use subsidies to attract FDI. It deserves some credit for Ireland’s economic boom, having focused early on attracting pharma, IT and financial services to the country. The idea that a county would have something like a quota of IDA-supported jobs is just plain odd. It seems to take something positively and intelligently provided for the good of the economy, and turn it into a mealy-mouthed entitlement.

There are sensible points, too. The press release asks what should be done for commuter-belt counties that can’t compete with Dublin on providing jobs, and instead are turning into vast dormitory suburbs storing up social trouble. But I just can’t get over the presumption and entitlement in it, and the underlying idea that economic growth within a country is a zero sum game.

The kicker is that this sudden concern for Meath is triggered by the closure of an NEC factory in the area, and the direct loss of about 350 jobs. The factory’s moving to Malaysia. Nothing strange there, and probably little or nothing the government could have done to stop it, short of imposing Soviet style price controls to try and keep down the cost of labour in Ireland. But as high consumer prices have been a political football in Ireland for the past year or so, the blame for the closure is laid at the government’s door:

“The fact that NEC plans to move production to Malaysia demonstrates again how the Government is losing the competitiveness challenge by driving up costs and pricing Ireland out of the market.”

Eh, no. We were a middle income country, now we’re a high income one. So prices went up to meet demand, and we pretty much caught up with the rest of Europe on labour costs. There’s no mystery here. We’re simply victims of our own success. Now we have to figure out what our economic strategy is for life in a world of low transport and labour costs that’s teaming with people who speak English just as good as we do. You really don’t have to be a Nobel prize nominee to see that.

Sure, there are lots of things that could and should be done differently. (That’s why I’ll be supporting the opposition in the election we expect this year.) But we are not going to figure out how to respond as nimbly and successfully to deepening globalisation if we let ourselves be hoodwinked into thinking economic reality is something the government cooked up. Simply surviving the ‘competitiveness challenge’ of the next 20 years will require straight thinking and plain talking, and not the pious buck-passing that currently passes for political thought.