James Wickham: In a recent article in the Irish Times (4 November) Philip Lane warned that higher levels of income taxation could restrict Ireland's ability ' to attract and retain the highly skilled mobile professionals that are key to future economic growth'. This argument needs some discussion.
We could and probably should talk about whether it's desirable to commit ourselves to a form of economic growth that gives 'highly skilled mobile professionals' a veto over taxation policy. But there are smaller scale more empirical issues that can usefully be discussed.
Research on mobile professionals shows that taxation is only one of the reasons why people choose to live in a country. There is evidence that taxation influences location choice, but other things also matter. Issues here range from personal safety to the quality of life. Indeed there is a whole literature in urban geography associated with Richard Florida's claim that young and mobile professionals (the 'creative class') move to cities that offer social, cultural and intellectual diversity. Slightly facetiously, we could say: forget about taxation, just ensure there's some decent music and good craic...
Of course the point is that much 'quality of life' involves public expenditure. A decent health system, a proper public transport system, public broadcasting, even decent public spaces, do not come free. And interestingly, we do have research that suggests these things can attract people to live or stay in a country, and equally we do know that many young and mobile professionals bemoan the lack of such things in Ireland (e.g. Boyle (2006)).
It's also important to disaggregate these 'highly skilled mobile professionals'. For example, we could differentiate between 'visitors' who have no commitment to the country, and 'settlers' who intend to spend much of their life here; we could differentiate between 'experts' who earn say over than €60k (the current minimum income for the Irish Green Card permit) and 'stars' who receive more than (say) €150k. It's clear that what motivates visiting stars is probably very different to what motivates settler experts. Some people (visitors) do move temporarily to Dubai, but it's not clear whether such people are the same as those needed in Ireland - and do we really want to develop Dubai-type expat zones in Ireland anyway?
It can also be argued that relying on visiting stars has dangerous implications for the labour market - it creates a culture of high reward short termism, otherwise known as greed.
Most fundamentally of all, surely it's time to start discussing the disadvantages of inequality. Work such as Wilkinson & Pickett (The Spirit Level - Why More Equal Socieities almost always do better) has alerted social scientists to the detriminetal effects of inequality on all members of the society. In other words, in an unequal society even the better off do worse. And furthermore, these effects are generated by inequality 'at the top' (gap between the very wealthy and the rest) rather than just by inequality 'at the bottom' (gap between the poor and the rest). Facilitating visting stars, in other words, may actually have very detrimental indirect effects on the whole society.
Professor James Wickham
James Wickham was Jean Monnet Professor of European Labour Market Studies and Professor in Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely on employment, transport and migration in Ireland and Europe; he is the author of Gridlock: Dublin’s Transport Crisis and the Future of the City and co-author of New Mobilities in Europe: Polish Migration to Ireland post-2004. His book Unequal Europe: Social divisions and social cohesion in an old continent analysed the collapse of the European Social Model; his new text book European Societies (Routledge 2020) examines the structures of inequality in contemporary Europe. He is a former director of TASC.
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