http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6638711.stm
ah sure faydin begorrah, isnt hard its been with all these new machines and things. thanks beeb for a wonderful overview of the Celtic Tiger. It always scares me when I read stuff like this - you wonder if they get it so wrong about the place you know most, what does that say about what you read about other places. to their defence, they are representing the views of particular groups; in this case farmers, pensioners and experimental rock musicians. but what a completely one-sided overview.
the fact that ireland has done so well in the last few years has really bothered some people. in fairness to the article, i agree that there has been some relative losers from the Celtic Tiger process, including farmers. however, the article gives the impression that we are all sitting around bemoaning this terrible progress that has been thrust upon our innocent heads. having grown up in a working class housing estate in the 1980's at a time of double-digit unemployment, mass level industrial actions (ok still some of these!), recessions, forced emigration etc., etc., ill take what we have now thanks.
9 comments:
Irish people may have a short memory or just enjoy moaning, but I think maybe this article taps into a legitimate discontent- one which is worth a rant!
I think in modern society the economic goals of maximum production and maximum consumption have become incredibly pervasive throughout society and it appears that in many ways the person has been forgotten. The contemporary self is in many cases a somewhat unsure, fragmented and empty one, more of a taste fabric of new media and leisure pursuits than a solid character with personal conviction and a sense of personal worth.
Faced with a demand to work hard and control impulsivity through 9-5 coupled with an active media promotion of immediate gratification and consumption to take up ones leisure time it is no wonder that people fill themselves to the brim with alcohol or food and empty their wallets for commodities with purely symbolic value, when they just want to belong in a world which has meaning and value.
I was in the housing estate in the '80's, the carpets were dreary and the lino was an eye sore, but at least we knew the names of all the people on our street and the sources of societal problems were more clearly visible and far less insidious.
that one could run for days and i do accept that there seems to have been some trade-off between economic development and community capital. however, the bbc article made no attempt to counter-balance these negative aspects with many of the positive ones e.g. continuous declining infant mortality, greater opportunities for women, better nutrition, lower unemployment, better healthcare (though hard to believe sometimes) ... the list goes on. I agree that a huge task now is for the development of mental technologies that help people regain control over the constant assault on their senses. but the fact remains that there are relative winners and relative losers from social dynamics. that article just focused on the relative losers.
Yes this could run for days if not years but is there any way of testing some hypothesis? Like Liam I am skeptical of the "Dublin in the rare old times" lark and what I think is fairly bogus nostalgia.I grew up in a corporation estate in the 60's & 70s & my parents did 30 years before that.I would not want to go back to that, poverty sucks.
So the question is how can we formulate a testable hypothesis that we have lost something valuable with the economic prosperity? Are people less likely to know their neighbours & if so does it matter since we may associate in other ways? Retrospective questions are useless I suspect.I wonder would Eurobarometer be of any use?
It seems Ireland is not the only country losing community capital, a post in the situationist points to the loss of empathy in Japan and cites some interesting research into altruism amongst cohorts of Japanese children. Interestingly they talk about the same timeline as we are discussing and specifically that spontaneous sharing amongst children has halved since the mid-80's.
http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/the-loss-of-empathy-in-japan/
What evidence is there that Ireland is losing community capital? What evidence is there that this capital is of value? The social-capital-believers seem to have their minds made up but the evidence base is lacking. The evidence for Japan reported in that article does not seem that strong.
The remark " that people fill themselves to the brim with alcohol or food and empty their wallets for commodities with purely symbolic value, when they just want to belong in a world which has meaning and value." is rather paternalistic (& strikes me as distinctly New Age-ish) implying that the observer knows better what people want than they themselves.
Had a look into this. There is some good data relating to social cohesion indicators on the OECD website. It seems Ireland is doing relatively well in regard to most of such aspects including subjective well-being, social isolation and is just slightly below OECD average in regard to group membership. One stat may indicate a lack of social participation and community engagement as a general trend-65% of those in OECD countries rarely or never have contact with people in social groups (outside of friendship groups and work).
Suicide rates have almost doubled since 1980 in Ireland where there was an overall decrease across OECD countries indicating there is still need for concern. Drug taking is also through the roof as we all know.
Whether or not we have lost something valuable it is not clear from this data, and on the surface the data seems to say we have little to worry about. However, trends over time are missing for much of this data and it is also possible that significant problems lie in the form or quality of social participation that exists today rather than the quantity (e.g. extent of social support, trust, reciprocity etc.).
http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,2340,en_2649_34637_2671576_1_1_1_1,00.html#howto
carol newman and i mined data sources like the Living in Ireland to examine changes in well-being over the Celtic Tiger. unsurprisingly, financial satisfaction and satisfaction with work increased markedly but satisfaciton with leisure and housing remained static. We did not find any systematic trend in a more general measure (the GHQ-12) over time. Kahneman's focusing illusion paper is relevant here .
also, i have done a lot of work on the European Social Survey. The Nordic countries have higher "social capital" than everywhere else on every measure. Ireland is next best and this applies to both 2002 and 2005. Mick O'Connell wrote a book (its in ken's office) that made use of old ISSP and Eurobarometer data sets that is worth looking at.
This sounds like some interesting work on social capital, though I wonder to what extent it would address the argument inherent in the first comment:
Modern society, more than ever promotes self-indulgence/immediate gratification and also self-denial. In general individuals aim to be culturally valued and behave as such. Reaching this aim often means unhealthy and/or economically disadvantageous behaviour.
An example would be that 70-80% of women manipulate their eating daily, usually in an attempt at restriction. This is clearly a larger percentage than the overweight and is therefore motivated by other reasons such as to achieve cultural ideals of thinness. This often leads to unhealthy thinness/eating disorders.
I don't think this logic is paternalistic or new agey and I am also not sure as to the extent it should relate to available social capital measures. If people feel body anxiety and feel they are empowering themselves through self-restraint as in the example and this leads to disorder in the minority such trends would probably not show up on very broad measures such as life-satisfaction and social isolation. It may be worthwhile to look at generational, gender and socioeconomic differences over time to identify the relative winners and losers. However, I think that significant distress even to the extent of normative discontent with particular aspects of life are difficult to assess using broad measures within which there is likely to be important domains of the persons life which are winning or losing out to a greater extent than previously in contemporary society.
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