Is Lisbon Relevant? Threats to National Independence.

I saw studies from a few years ago indicating that Arts students tend on average to earn less than those who don't to to college at all. They were conducted in England, mind, but I doubt English human nature as Ard-T would have us percieve it is all that different from Irish human nature so my point would still stand.

Johnfás, do Arts students earn more than barristers and doctors, because if they don't then since moneyz is the primary motivation we can assume that all Arts students tried and failed to get into law and medicine.

A significant proportion of barristers are in fact Arts graduates, including three or four of the Supreme Court bench. Your own favourite, Lord Denning, was a Mathematician, Lord Atkin who you will remember from Donoghue v Stevenson was educated in the Classics. Nearly half of the current law lords are graduates of the humanities. A significant number of the heads of major global banking institutions are also graduates of the humanities, including the CEOs of RBS, Llyods and Barclays, who are all either graduates of History or Politics. The current CEO of Citigroup is an electrical engineer.

When I attended at interview a number of weeks ago in one of the "big 5" law firms neither of the partners interviewing me were law graduates, they were in fact both graduates of the humanities.

People who are intelligent and work hard do well irrespective of their choice of study at university. You'd be wrong if you think people just study at university based on the points of subjects. Ard was recently asking me in the Sibín about a friend of mine who studied at university with me. She got 600 points in her Leaving Cert and is now a scholar of Cambridge University, recently she represented Cambridge reaching the semi final of University Challenge. The course she chose at university was 380 points owing to the fact that the points system is purely supply and demand based. Did she do it because she didn't get into law? No. She did it because she wanted to study a particular subject and she wanted to study it at a particular institution.

The fact that you refer to a faculty as a course and then separate it from a subject studied under that faculty shows that you really don't know alot about these faculties. Philosophy is a course which is generally studied within faculties such as Arts and Humanities.

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

cactus flower wrote:

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

In fairness, he doesn't have to, he has the evidence of the last umpteen thousand years to back him up.

tonys wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

In fairness, he doesn't have to, he has the evidence of the last umpteen thousand years to back him up.

Not at all tonys. The human species has been around more than 160,000 years. Capitalism is a couple of hundred.years old and is showing extreme signs of distress and dysfunction.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html

cactus flower wrote:

tonys wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

In fairness, he doesn't have to, he has the evidence of the last umpteen thousand years to back him up.

Not at all tonys. The human species has been around more than 160,000 years. Capitalism is a couple of hundred.years old and is showing extreme signs of distress and dysfunction.

]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html

Working for reward is as old as the hills, capitalism just brought sophistication to the process, it didn't have to invent it, it goes back to when Adam saw Eve with the apple and thought, I wouldn’t mind sinking my teeth into that.

tonys wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

tonys wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

In fairness, he doesn't have to, he has the evidence of the last umpteen thousand years to back him up.

Not at all tonys. The human species has been around more than 160,000 years. Capitalism is a couple of hundred.years old and is showing extreme signs of distress and dysfunction.

]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html

Working for reward is as old as the hills, capitalism just brought sophistication to the process, it didn't have to invent it, it goes back to when Adam saw Eve with the apple and thought, I wouldn’t mind sinking my teeth into that.

Which proves the point that you don't need capitalism to get rewards

evercloserunion wrote:

So presumably, then, all students go into courses which will get you high-paying jobs like law and medicine, and all the courses which are least likely to get you high-paying jobs (like Arts, Philosophy, Social sciences etc.) are empty.

No, because you haven't taken personal characteristics, preferences and circumstances into account. Many courses for law and medicine are fairly exclusive and selective, especially in a place like RCSI. That means that people, who may want to get into a high-paying career from these courses simply can't get into them and must go for other careers.

Furthermore, there is an imperfect level of knowledge about courses and their earnings potential. Some people simply aren't aware of the income to be earned from particular courses so they don't choose them.

And on a final point, college courses in and of themselves are a route to higher earnings anyway. People may pick a general course for a generally high level of pay after receiving their degrees so the distribution of students into each particular course would have very little to do with incomes and suchlike.

cactus flower wrote:

tonys wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

I don't think that Ard Taoiseach has proven the case that economic growth is in itself of necessity a good thing, or that people won't work unless for financial reward.

In fairness, he doesn't have to, he has the evidence of the last umpteen thousand years to back him up.

Not at all tonys. The human species has been around more than 160,000 years. Capitalism is a couple of hundred.years old and is showing extreme signs of distress and dysfunction.

[url=http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3814-dawn-of-human-race-uncovered.html[/quote[/url]]

So Marcus Licinius Crassus wasn't an example of capitalism in the first century BC, nor the Phoenician traders of the 16th to 4th centuries BC? Just because the science and theories of capitalism have only been developed in the last few centuries doesn't mean that it hasn't been around for much longer before. Gravity wasn't invented when Newton observed the apple falling from the tree. And if we're getting into this game of the science of capitalism being only a couple of centuries old, I could just as easily say that socialism is but a construct of the 19th century and capitalism precedes it by approximately 200 years. The fact of the matter is that macroeconomics as a discipline did not fully emerge until the 20th century when it was possible to undertake regular national accounts and the statistical models were there to support them.

cactus flower wrote:

ibis wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

The published figures I have looked at go from 15% of GDP in 2005 to 23% in 2007 - so we are both wrong, or right.

http://www.amaresearch.co.uk/Irish_Construction_Market_07s.html

I was thinking of construction employment which was at 14% in 2007. In any event, the 25% of GDP was a peak, in one year ( a year of shocking brinkmanship ).

Fair enough - weird, though - I have the 23% and the 17% the other way round (23% in 2005 as per the graph)!

cactus flower wrote:

Personal indebtedness and other spending, not mortgage-related, also soared in the same period.
Ireland was the second biggest purchaser of European commercial property in 2007. Limits on Irish mortgages would not have stopped that. Irish mortgages were actually declining.

Prudential limits on lending would have stopped it. A good comparison is the property boom in the 80's in the UK. Bank of England interest rates were between 9% and 14% - yet still they had a property boom, and for the same reason. It had nothing to do with interest rates, and neither did ours - it all has to do with the prudence of lending.

Bank of England Historical Rates

Can't remember at this stage if I have already pointed out that India did all the things, and more, that you suggest, including a ban on lending for "raw land" and that foreign money (much of it UK) came in and took up the demand, so that indebtedness continued to rise just the same. There is potential for a thread here on the globalised land. housing and construction market that would be worth exploring.

The fact that irrespective of the figures, construction at no stage was more than 25% of GDP, leaves the rest of the economy to account for.

Cactus, am just back to the site tonight properly after a while, so apologies if I am asking you to repeat ad nauseum. Would be interested in your source info for your comments on India.

johnfás wrote:

A significant proportion of barristers are in fact
Arts graduates, including three or four of the Supreme Court bench.
Your own favourite, Lord Denning, was a Mathematician, Lord Atkin who
you will remember from Donoghue v Stevenson was educated in the
Classics. Nearly half of the current law lords are graduates of the
humanities. A significant number of the heads of major global banking
institutions are also graduates of the humanities, including the CEOs
of RBS, Llyods and Barclays, who are all either graduates of History or
Politics. The current CEO of Citigroup is an electrical engineer.

When
I attended at interview a number of weeks ago in one of the "big 5" law
firms neither of the partners interviewing me were law graduates, they
were in fact both graduates of the humanities.

People who are
intelligent and work hard do well irrespective of their choice of study
at university. You'd be wrong if you think people just study at
university based on the points of subjects. Ard was recently asking me
in the Sibín about a friend of mine who studied at university with me.
She got 600 points in her Leaving Cert and is now a scholar of
Cambridge University, recently she represented Cambridge reaching the
semi final of University Challenge. The course she chose at university
was 380 points owing to the fact that the points system is purely
supply and demand based. Did she do it because she didn't get into law?
No. She did it because she wanted to study a particular subject and she
wanted to study it at a particular institution.

The fact that
you refer to a faculty as a course and then separate it from a subject
studied under that faculty shows that you really don't know alot about
these faculties. Philosophy is a course which is generally studied within faculties such as Arts and Humanities.

You needn't go lecturing me on where various judges come from. I was
not saying that no lawyers were Arts students or that no Arts students
were lawyers, but the majority of Arts students are not lawyers
wouldn't you agree. I was simply going on studies and statistics which
I have seen and facts which I know to represent the general state of
things in order to point out a problem I have with Ard-T's rather black
and white view of the world. If money is the primary motivation for
work then why don't people all work at what will earn them the most
money? By saying that some Arts students go on to earn lots of money
you miss the point; a lot of students in general as well as workers
don't go on to earn as much as they could have.

Of course, I remember now that you were yourself an Arts student and so
I'm probably touching a personal nerve here. Disclaimer: I don't hate
Arts students and I don't think they're all incompetent. I chose it as
an example because (a) it contains such a wide range of topics and (b)
it's such a large course student-wise. We may leave it at that a far as
the Arts example goes because we're not going to make any progress on a
topic so close to your heart. Another example would be lawyers in big
firms who don't want to make partner, about 40% of new recruits in one
London City firm.

At the end of the day it's not about the specific examples. Money is
key to survival and survival dominates our choices, but beyond that
money as a motivation ceases to be of much more importance than other
factors in the long run. Self-interest is a widespread human trait to
be sure but that doesn't say much since interests are not uniform
across the species. Accumulation of wealth is one interest,
characterized by a trait we would know cynically as greed (and perhaps
less cynically by another name), which exists in some people but not
necessarily all people.

ibis wrote:

Prudential limits on lending would have stopped it. A good comparison is the property boom in the 80's in the UK. Bank of England interest rates were between 9% and 14% - yet still they had a property boom, and for the same reason. It had nothing to do with interest rates, and neither did ours - it all has to do with the prudence of lending.

Bank of England Historical Rates

That may be so, ibis, but on interest rates, you're not comparing like with like. Yes, the absolute interest rate was 9-14% over that period, but the inflation rate was 7.4% over the period 1985-90(I took an average of the 85-90 figure which is 7.38% to be precise). This means that real interest rates were only 2-7% over that period which compares more readily to today.

Atticus wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

ibis wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

The published figures I have looked at go from 15% of GDP in 2005 to 23% in 2007 - so we are both wrong, or right.

http://www.amaresearch.co.uk/Irish_Construction_Market_07s.html

I was thinking of construction employment which was at 14% in 2007. In any event, the 25% of GDP was a peak, in one year ( a year of shocking brinkmanship ).

Fair enough - weird, though - I have the 23% and the 17% the other way round (23% in 2005 as per the graph)!

cactus flower wrote:

Personal indebtedness and other spending, not mortgage-related, also soared in the same period.
Ireland was the second biggest purchaser of European commercial property in 2007. Limits on Irish mortgages would not have stopped that. Irish mortgages were actually declining.

Prudential limits on lending would have stopped it. A good comparison is the property boom in the 80's in the UK. Bank of England interest rates were between 9% and 14% - yet still they had a property boom, and for the same reason. It had nothing to do with interest rates, and neither did ours - it all has to do with the prudence of lending.

Bank of England Historical Rates

Can't remember at this stage if I have already pointed out that India did all the things, and more, that you suggest, including a ban on lending for "raw land" and that foreign money (much of it UK) came in and took up the demand, so that indebtedness continued to rise just the same. There is potential for a thread here on the globalised land. housing and construction market that would be worth exploring.

The fact that irrespective of the figures, construction at no stage was more than 25% of GDP, leaves the rest of the economy to account for.

Cactus, am just back to the site tonight properly after a while, so apologies if I am asking you to repeat ad nauseum. Would be interested in your source info for your comments on India.

http://www.sustecweb.co.uk/current/sustec17-1/how_india_avoided_the_big_bubble.htm

Hi Atticus. My firewall has gone mad, so I haven't read this link. If you google "India raw land loans property" or similar you'll find a few accounts of this. Was India interesting?