According to new figures from the Central Statistics Office, Dubliners have the highest levels of disposable income in the State.

Everybody has more to spend, but Dubliners more than anyone else. The unfortunate people of Roscommon are worst off of all. While the average Dub has nearly £10,000 annually to spend as he likes, the poor muck-savage in Roscommon has only about £7,000, while the simple gob-daws of Offaly have only about £100 more.

Already, the economists and commentators are agonising over the regional differences, racking their brains about the distribution of our new-found wealth and lamenting the supposed unfairness of it all. They pay lip-service to the notion that Dublin just might be slightly more expensive to live in than Gortnasillagh or Cloonbeg but in reality their hearts bleed for allegedly poor country folk who do not have all the supposed opportunities offered to Dublin jackeens.

A lot of this has to do with guilt, misplaced regional loyalty, illogical mathematics and a completely inadequate understanding of cultural factors and national demographics: not to mention a lack of appreciation for what wealth actually consists of.

Taking the demographics first, it is surely no secret (except to economists) that most so-called Dubliners are from the country, in particular Mayo and Kerry. This skews the CSO figures straightaway. These part-time Dubliners have long recognised that they can pick up the maximum disposable income in the capital, and dispose of most of it with great pleasure on their regular weekend trips home.

Meawnhile, the few remaining real Dubliners now live mostly in Clare. This brings into focus the alleged "race for prosperity" that we are all supposedly engaged in. The people who use this kind of idiotic shorthand never take cognisance of the fact that many of us would not run to the end of the street in order to merely increase our "disposable income" by a few pounds. We have more interesting things to be doing with our time.

That is why so many Dubliners have gone off to Clare: to get out of the race, and live a little. And of course this exodus has contributed to the increase in disposable income of those left behind in Dublin, who prove by staying there that they are the more greedy and acquisitive types.

Similarly, the cute hoors of Mayo and Kerry who elect to stay in their home counties rather than move to Dublin are those who are less interested in material advancement: hence the reduced financial "drive" of these counties, as reflected in the CSO figures.

Much media attention was give to the fact that the south-east of the country had fallen behind the west and the Border counties in the wealth share-out.

So why has the sunny south-east slipped into the shade? Well, it's hardly as if the region has been entirely blotted out, or tipped into an economic black hole, but we were generally given to understand that an enormous financial calamity had taken place, resulting in a huge regional imbalance.

In reality, the figures show that south-easterners now have barely a couple of hundred pounds less in disposable income than the men of the west, and one doubts if decent folk from Carlow to Wexford are bothered in the least by this tiny disadvantage.

In the western region that leaves only Galway, without which the west would still be nowhere in the national share-out.

Not that the west cares that much. Apart from the insane greed, ugly materialism and unbridled acquisitiveness of the new Galway, the west is generally above such vulgar considerations, and has long recognised the foolishness of measuring a nation's wealth in terms of disposable money, or of money at all.

It is surely time for a "smart" index, county by county, to be established by some institution other than the Central Statistics Office. The notion of disposable intelligence or of simple common sense (the SCS index, perhaps) might then gain ground.

People would learn to apply basic intelligence to the dreary day-to-day pressures of working life, but reserve most of their brainpower and time for the real business of living. The so-called race for prosperity might then take on a genuine meaning.

bglacken@irish-times.ie