Madam, - I think there are many more applications for "morganomics" (self-fulfilling economic modelling) apart from Morgan Kelly's suggestion in your edition of August 15th that no one buy a house for three years and the price will drop by over 50 per cent. You do not need to be a professor of economics to know that if buyers were to behave along morganomic principles then property would have absolutely no value at all. In this scenario buyers should merely take over houses for nothing and Morgan's your uncle.
On Morning Irelandlast week Christoper McKevitt was gloating about the fall in rents reported by daft.ie and the holocaust being visited on landlords. Perhaps some proper economic analysis might be applied to the daft.ie analysis so that ordinary punters might know exactly how much a fall of 1 to 6 per cent in rent represents.
Are we looking at a few euro a week here? The price of a couple of pints in the student bar? Armageddon?
What would happen to registration fees if all students avoided UCD for three years? What would happen to the RTÉ advertising rate card prices if all advertisers avoided the national broadcaster for the next three years? In morganonics we have the answer.
For their own sake we need to cut off the oxygen to these prophets of doom before they become the self-fulfilling cause of massive job losses at UCD and RTE. Thankfully the coping classes (as Senator Eoghan Harris correctly calls us) outside RTÉ and UCD are far more pragmatic and resilient.
- Yours, etc,
GERRY MURPHY, Blackrock, Co Dublin.
Madam, - How could The Irish Timespublish the article by Mark Fitzgerald in your edition of August 21st? It was completely incoherent and contained many non-sequiturs as well as poor grammar, punctuation and style.
One of the most egregious of the many examples of poor writing occurs after Mr Fitzgerald rambles about state infrastructure and Northern Irish politics. He then says we must regain our competitive advantage and subsequently produces the completely baffling sentence: "Already this is beginning to happen, painful and all as it is for many people in selling their house."
On first reading I was convinced that a paragraph was inadvertently omitted or two separate articles were somehow mixed together. How selling one's house helps a nation regain its competitive advantage is anyone's guess.
When he does finally get around to discussing the Irish economy and housing market, he writes: "Only time will tell with the benefit of hindsight, which segment of people were financially the wiser". Surely "segment of people" is a crime against the English language and I have never heard the two phrases "only time will tell" and "with the benefit of hindsight" used together.
His last paragraph is one of the worst I have ever read in a broadsheet newspaper. The grammar is poor and the argument incomprehensible.
Mr Fitzgerald uses the conditional form "would be" without providing a condition. He writes incoherently about "our party political system" and sticks in the completely misplaced adverb "mutually". In the last sentence he rambles about the diplomacy of Irish politicians in Europe for no apparent reason at all.
I thought that Denis O'Brien's column last week on the same subject was poorly written, but at least it was comprehensible. It is telling that in the interests of balance The Irish Timeshas had to lower its standards in order to find contributors who are bullish about the Irish economy and property market.
- Yours, etc,
BARRY THORNTON, Zurich, Switzerland.