Brave and artful mix at Kilkenomics: Rugby is not played ‘on paper’ but ‘on grass’; the Irish housing market doesn’t take place in charts and in textbooks but in real life, in real time, involving real people – David McWilliams
I lifted this line from an article David McWilliams wrote at the weekend for the Sunday Business Post on the Need for Rent Control in Ireland. It is typical of David’s ability to draw on everyday analogies to help us understand or realise what is really happening in the economy and more to the point what we can expect if we don’t make changes. On a similar note I listened to a Podcast a while back that David did with Roisin Ingle. He named Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as the first Finance Minister predicting seven years of greed followed by seven years of famine.
Seven years of bumper crops are on their way
Years of plenty, endless wheat and tons of hay
Your farms will boom, there won’t be room
To store the surplus food you grow
After that, the future doesn’t look so bright
Egypt’s luck will change completely overnight
And famine’s hand will stalk the land
With food an all-time low
This made me laugh out loud but I also thought how right he is, how clever he is to draw on this example. Not only does it make us sit up and think ‘ what the heck’ but also it is economics in layman’s terms.
David is a brilliant economist. I have had the pleasure of working closely with him for almost 10 years now, placing him as Keynote Speaker with business and political world leaders in Abu Dhabi, USA, Canada, London, Sydney, Barcelona, and Ireland. He is asked back time and time again because of his content and his unique ability to communicate it. On the feedback form we constantly get “David was fantastic and very funny”. Even at 9am David brings in humour as part of his talk and the audience thank him for it.
Because of his own personal experience in front of live audiences I know David recognises when there is a hunger for more discussion and knowledge on economics but he always marries it eloquently with humour – the perfect balance as such. Along with his co-founder Richard Cook, they have again attracted an amazing selection of talent for this year’s Kilkenomics Festival where they bravely and artfully mix comedians with world class economists and opinion leaders.
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