Fin Keegan

Another interesting revelation from the UNICEF report on Child Well-Being in Rich Countries I wrote about previously is that books are not valued in many wealthy and successful countries.

Below is a chart from that survey showing the Percentage of Children age 15 reporting less than 10 books in the home. It’s hard to generalize (even for me!) based on these figures so I will just confine myself to noting that the paucity of books in over 10% of Irish homes should be a real cause for concern for parents, children, educators, and community leaders here.

Unfortunately, despite Ireland’s literary tradition and love of the English language–whether spoken, written, or sung–our libraries are generally lamentable.

It may surprise you to hear that their equivalents in Las Vegas, where we previously lived, were infinitely superior in every way than their oddly impoverished Irish counterparts. (See comparison figures below).

On top of this, booksellers here are not what they were (vide , for one, the stock-gutting of Waterstones on Dawson Street), we love television, and the public transport system is poor: together all conspire to reduce opportunities for people to read good books. Children, meanwhile, are not read to at night, and when they are taken to bookshops find either “franchise books” (which may or may not be good) and celebrity tie-in pulp, which is generally not.

Quite reasonably they conclude more fun will be had online or playing console games.

So, what are we going to do about it? Read to your kids every bedtime. Let them see you enjoying books. And maybe embarrass your local bookseller into thinking beyond Harry Potter, Madonna, and Enid Blyton

The figures from the two library systems: Las Vegas slightly outspends Ireland on library stock purchased [$5.47 to $5.10 per capita]. But the most telling characteristic, for me, is the non-stock spend: only 11% of the Irish budget is spent on stock. Las Vegas, by contrast, raises their stock-spend to 20%, almost double the Irish rate, while maintaining an ambitious expansion program to meet the needs of a continuing population influx. [Sources: Ireland; Las Vegas; and xe.net for currency rates]

A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

Here’s what Google makes of “Fin likes to”:

Fin likes to read coffee-table picture books about the railroad in the 19th century…

Fin likes to sit in the space between the wall and the bed…

Fin likes to stare longer than decorum permits…

Fin likes to be and knows he is alone because he is “different”…

Fin likes to rasp through the skin of cucumbers…

Fin likes to get all the way down by my feet…

Fin likes to be poked with a stick…

Fin likes to get the job done when he is on hot pursuit of the criminals…

If only André Breton had lived to use the Internet.

Image: ‘Found 16mm’ by N°1 on flickr

The “Classical Irish Island”, according to archaeologist Paul Gosling, is “replete with…

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

It’s hard to think of another nation as principled as the United States: the system of government and values, as set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is a richly conceived philosophy, many of whose propositions and imperatives are not only known by rote but also profoundly grasped by her citizens.

The Enlightenment values upon which the American system rests are equally impeccable: Freedom, Equality, and the Dignity of the Individual. One cannot find fault with them.

But the massacres of Baghdad and Blacksburg alike illustrate the difficulty we face: our ideals confound human frailty: as time wears on, the gap between Principle and Reality grows wider.

In Iraq, the right thing to do was to depose Saddam Hussein–but we were patently the wrong people to do it: in fact, the only right people to do it were the Iraqis. Taking their history away from them proved catastrophic.

At home, meanwhile, the moral laxity of our response to the Virginia Tech massacre (i.e. the refusal to examine our gun culture) exposes the danger of attachment to principles that may seem eternal and necessary but are anything but. We need to outgrow our childish fascination with firearms, together with the delusions of power it embodies.

The principle is not the issue: we are.

Listening to Margaret Atwood recently, defining Canada’s identity solely in terms of its heavyweight neighbour, made me fear for the future of smaller, peripheral nations such as Canada and my own native country, Ireland.

With globalisation of culture and commerce rising around us as inexorably as the oceans, our Nation States are showing signs of disintegration: Anglo-Canada’s identity seems to be dwindling down to “NotAmerica.ca”, Ireland’s to “NotTheUK.ie”, and Francophone-Europe to “PasLaFrance.zut”.

Dubliners, when not gossipping into their cellphones or weeping over the tribulations of English celebrities and soccer teams (AKA corporations) , are forever telling us how confident and well-adjusted into Europeanness they are: so well-adjusted that if you describe them as British, which they largely are, they almost suffer a stroke.

But, if there is no positive identity behind the rhetoric, what is the point of carrying on, except out of an atavistic vanity? Dublin now has reverted to the quasi-English city it was when Queen Victoria visited, only with designer icons in place of Union Jacks; all one ever hears from Anglophone Canadians is how frightful it is to be mistaken for Americans.

The fact is that Mother Tongue more than Location or even History, mass trauma aside, defines groups most exactly and the foundational slogans of the New Exceptionalists (Ireland and Canada, e.g.) will quickly wear thin when actual sacrifice is called for (e.g. meeting the true costs of Defense, Counter-Terrorism, or Oil)

Margaret Atwood was speaking on ABC Radio Australia.

John C. Goodman and Laurence Kotlikoff have put together a modified version of Steve Forbes’ famous flat tax plan.

What I like about their plan (linked below) is the implicit distinction between “rich” and “poor” dollars, i.e. the acknowledgment that one’s ten-thousandth dollar has a different meaning, and hence value, from one’s ten-millionth dollar.

However, I think we should go further: continued progressivity to tax saturation. In other words: a universal salary cap.

Why? Because there is nothing, beyond single-handedly curing premature death, that any human being can do that merits earning on the current level of our billionaire class.

We’ve become so used to the endless pursuit of personal wealth that nobody thinks it odd anymore but, as any Martian will tell you, no mortal, American or otherwise, has any true need (or actual want, indeed) of their twenty-seventh million dollar wad.

Therefore I propose that the tax rate kicks in at the level suggested by Kotlikoff and Goodman ($46,000 for families) and thencefrom progresses at an evenly growing tax rate until, at $4.6 million, say, the rate terminates, necessarily, at 100%.

Granted, there will be a challenge to society (for one, how to re-allocate the money without bloating government) and the makers of fine shower curtains and umbrella stands might notice a dip in sales–but we would, on the up-side of my plan, be spared the obscene and ultimately damaging kink of our current system: wealth obesity.

Reference: John C. Goodman: A Kinder, Gentler Flat Tax Forbes, September 29th, 2005

A striking aspect of the Cold War at its deepest was the phenomenon of McCarthyism, which, through Congressional committee and media hysteria, sought to extirpate elements deemed subversive. Our paranoia necessarily paled in comparison to Stalin’s purges, but both shared the impulse to “cleanse” the body politic of heterogeneous elements.

(Similarly, the defense posture of the post-war Superpowers was symmetrical, to the point of producing Mutually Assured Destruction, an acronym to savour).

Although our current struggle against Islamo-fascism is assymetrical, Pat Robertson’s ungentle suggestion that the President of Venezuela be assasinated produced another likeness worth noting. One of the few words in Arabic that Westerners know is fatwa: an opinion or injunction promulgated by a religious authority. We first heard the term when the Ayatollah Khomeni attempted to murder a peaceful man, Salman Rushdie, whose only crime was storytelling. Subsequent clerical directives have spiritually underwritten murder the world over, from New York to Bali. And now comes the moral test for us that McCarthyism once posed and which, until decency re-emerged, we failed: an influential religious authority in our own society has issued a call for murder.

In effect, the McCarthys and the Robertsons suggest to our opponents that we are, essentially, their equal in amorality. And, in forfeiting principle, they comfort the Enemy, who relishes moral weakness more than any other.

Such a proposition therefore must be roundly refuted, especially by leaders in those communities (mostly Republicans) to whom Robertson, a tele-evanglist, appeals.

There must be no equivocation: we may kill, but we don’t murder.

Backstory: Pat Robertson calls for assassination of Hugo Chavez

Posted: August 22nd, 2005

Last week, Francis Spufford gave an interesting talk on the notion of “Plenty”–what does it mean “to have or not to have enough”?

Some highlights:

I propose a rule: if you aren’t sure whether you really live in plenty, you do.

…

From our cornucopias…pour houses that keep out the weather, clean water to bathe in daily, medicines to prolong life, clothes no-one wore before us — and then stuff, oh a torrent of stuff of unimaginable profusion and variety, stuff to tempt us, stuff to entertain us, stuff to decorate ourselves with, stuff to transport us from place to place, stuff to store other stuff in.

…

We are still running as hard as we can, with apparently undiminished urgency, and our desires still feel to us as if they are thwarted and fulfilled in the proportions you’d expect from a resistant universe.

…

[If] we all did decide, one at a time or all together, on some mark that represented adequate plenty, and stopped buying at it, our plenty wouldn’t glide calmly to a halt. It would collapse, because the system depends on striving, and whatever no longer strives to rise in our system doesn’t just stop rising, it immediately and inexorably sinks.

That’s why in our age of plenty everyone who can is still working frantically hard

Full Transcript: BBC Radio 3 - Twenty Minutes: Plenty: The Land of Cockaigne

Image: povertycodes, by thane via flickr.