The challenge for the year ahead for people in business is the same as ever, to make money. That should be enough. Making money is not at all easy, contrary to often-professed, but less often-practised, genteel and intellectual distaste for it. It will not be enough just to get on with making money and ignoring the critics. There is a challenge to win the argument that the pursuit of economic advancement is, neither personally nor socially, driven necessarily by greed, requires amoral acquiescence, and excludes the very possibility of developing a just society.
It matters that this argument is vigorously entered into. The purpose of any serious critique of the Ireland that is generating wealth is not endless socio-cultural criticism or the satisfaction of deconstructing social beliefs as an end in itself. The point of serious critics is to influence public policy. It is a political project affecting the conditions in which money can be made and the economic well-being of the State secured. Perish the thought, but critics may occasionally seek to influence party political advantage.
It should not be too difficult to win the debate that most people in Ireland are better off with jobs rather than the dole or emigration. Ireland in the 21st century has also more equal opportunity than ever before, is more open and more accountable.
Even if a statistic can be produced to show that the difference between top and lowest incomes has widened over a recent period, this cannot mean that our society was then more just because that relative income gap was narrower. "Poor but just" is a variation on "poor but happy". The State's long spells of economic failure brought neither justice nor happiness. With wealth we can address justice and poverty in ways that we never could with poor economic performance.
It is undeniable that a lot of people are happier because they can get a job and live in their home State. Imagine, despite everything, people may be happier now than they would have been had we trundled along with lower growth and higher unemployment.
We must allow the wealth to grow freely, and that means tolerating wealthy people, I'm terribly sorry to say. There may even be wealthy people who will not behave themselves by hiding it from view, restraining from earning more or voting to have it all taxed away.
Some of the policy consequences of the lamentation of the negative aspects of modern life would be profound. Not only is it assumed that the difficulties of modern living and the social failures are all a consequence of recent growth, but it is frequently expected that Government can fix them all. More profoundly, it is assumed that growth itself has caused moral decline - in the space of about six years - and that the recent Budget will be the final nail in the moral coffin. If the Government is persuaded by policy influencers to compensate for the moral deficiencies of you and I and our compatriots, whether in the amount of time we spend with our children, how many children we have, the amount we consume, our roles as spouses, our degrees of jealousy, greed or charity, it will fail. No government can do this.
In lamenting what "we" have become through economic growth, there is an assumption that there is one very dominant culture to which "we" all belong. The call is then for budgets and legislation to fix the wrong problems. The depiction of a consumerist, child-neglecting, selfish and superficial culture is a contentious description of perhaps one sub-culture within Ireland. But is it the dominant culture? I don't think so. And also caused by government policy and economic growth? Such roots go much deeper.
In reality, there are now many sub-cultures in Ireland and it is a matter of irresolvable argument as to which is the dominant one. There is rural and urban, family and single, religious and secular, consumerist and thrifty, women in the home and women in the work force, and mixes thereof.
And are we talking about dominant in the media or dominant in life?
There is now a great opportunity to wrest away credibility from the idea that profit, paid work and growth are at variance with social justice, an admirable culture and personal happiness, and must be constrained before they do too much damage. The chance is to replace this fallacy with a demonstration that the generation of wealth and economic growth offer the way to make Ireland the best place in the world to live in for all of us.
Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication, Finance. Email: ooconnor@indigo.ie
