I think, therefore I am right about the economy. Wrong ...

CHILDREN are not the best at making causal connections.

It takes them a while to figure out that if they stand in the rain they’ll get wet.

Another gap in their philosophical knowledge is Bishop Berkeley’s question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Except, in the modern version, the ‘tree’ is a television they leave on whether or not there is anyone in the room to watch it.

This is based on my own observations. Before you assume that it is based on the actions of my badly-behaved children, I’ve observed this in their badly-behaved friends, also.

Naturally, I have tried to modify this behaviour. I tried to get them to consider the existential ramifications of an unwatched television. I tried nagging. I tried nagging with mild sarcasm. I pointed out that they were contributing to ecological disaster by wasting electricity. This didn’t work, but it did seem to vaguely pique their interest, so I upped the jeopardy by telling them that every time they left the TV on, a polar bear would die.

This worked, once.

Then again, adults aren’t so hot at making causal connections, either. When we are asked to pay for our water supply, or for the services provided by local authorities, many of us balk: as if the money will not go for a particular purpose, but be subsumed into the giant black pot marked ‘government’. The balkers have some justification, given that our government makes little or no effort to lay out, in black and white, exactly what the money will be used for.

Indeed, despite all the hours of discussion on the airwaves, politicians seem loath to disclose exactly what it is they do and what sorts of decisions they make: and, as a result, many citizens are ignorant of the complexities of running a country; that every decision has an economic, social, personal and moral aspect.

Which explains, at least in part, why the myth of the businessperson has grown up. Spurred on by a facile-minded media, we are daily presented with the idea that our thrusting entrepreneurs could probably run the country better: that to be a ‘job creator’ implies having access to arcane and mystical knowledge on the ‘business’ of governance.

Ireland isn’t the only place where this myth has taken hold. Last week’s Republican convention in the US contained repeated pops at President Barack Obama for his singular failure to have ever run a business.

But that’s right-wing Americans for you. You’d think we’d know better.

Having lived through the crass, soulless years of the Celtic Tiger, when all we did was show each other the money, you’d think we’d know that the profit motive doesn’t solve all problems.

That we are a society, not an economy.