Ireland’s outlook upgraded from negative to stable, bonds on course to shed their junk status, on course to re-enter the international bond markets, troika likely to be gone next year. Consumer sentiment up, unemployment down and a growth rate higher than most other countries in the EU. Yes, a few more difficult budgets ahead, but once we’re past them, the only way for Ireland is up!

consumer sentiment up? wrong, unemployment down? wrong again, young blueshirts delusions up! pretty obvious

Are you for real Dave?, a few more bad budgets are going to destroy this country taking more money from people that don’t have it!

Future outlook David is not the reality as you well know.

Dave is s troll. Don’t feed him

No, that’s been turned off and the bulb sold!!!

David take your head out of endas Ass and smell the coffee . Troll

David

You forget one thing. To have the effect of inflation reducing to cost of FG/Labours Anglo Bond, the Irish economy must outperform inflation by a minimum of 1% per year for the next 40 years. In 40 years time the children who started school for the first time last September will themselves be parents, and some may quite possibly be grandparents.

Answer me this are you really so blinded by the words (words cost nothing), that Enda & Michael are sprouting that you fail to understand basic maths? Maybe you had one of those failed teachers while growing up, and believe you owe them something. Well I wish you well in your continued ignorance. However the rest of us try to survive and raise our children and grandchildren while all the while paying for the sins of our fathers.

Did HL maths and am studying statistics and maths in college…..

Can I ask what inter household cash payments are?

When do you think David all this wonderful news regarding our rating upgrade will transfer into the real economy? Will we see the direct and tangible benefits of the promissory note deal? When will the upward trajectory this country you say is currently faced towards relieve the utter misery families in this country face every day? Macro economics will take years to filter down in to a micro level and so means nothing to the ordinary people of this country.

Well for a guy david that’s “Apparently” educated you don’t seem to grasp reality at all and i suggest you change your field of study because maths my friend is not your strong point !!!!

Yes Dave, but did you learn anything from those maths courses or are you (as suggested by your comments) another innumerate like Noonan who hasn’t checked the figures?

Hey Dave, ya know 58% of stats are made up.!!

Your probably still wrapped up in Keynesian Economics and there benefits. Basic and underlying flaw is clear “people” are required to act in a beneficial way towards the masses, guess what “people” are greedy and self serving thus this ethos is open to manipulation, but what I hear u say, your lecturer has stated this and Regulation is the counter balance, well meaningful regulation does not exist, and the laws are also useless as these have/are rewritten to pardon past and planned migration of wealth.

The game is rigged and rigged by the very think tanks most of ur college books are based around.

PS the bond market is broken and will collapse in the next year or so. The smart money is going into gold/silver, gold has gone up year on year for nearly the past 5 years (why?)
Dollar is dead and currency wars are underway, all this happened before and will again.

Wake up

I’ll have what David’s on. That must be one super happy druggy drug.
But seriously David, a family attempting to just about survive really aren’t that interested on going back into the bond markets. This macro overview of Ireland doesn’t really capture the ongoing reality of the day to day trauma that is occurring in every housing estate in the country. So please Dave, I know your heart is in the right place but it can sound condescending.

Still a tool though..

David, the problem with those very positive points you made is that the most vulnerable, ie the people mentioned above, won’t see the effects for another three or four years. For a lot of people it means living in poverty for almost a decade. Unfortunately, it also means we will have consistently high rates of emigration and suicide. (and, yes, I do categorise suicide as a result of poverty due to government decisions as murder).

David take your head out of your arse please !! The people have had enough no more money no matter what you say it’s not going to put money back into the people’s pockets , a property tax is immoral a form of vampirism on the people of ireland . PAYE pays for councils road tax pay for roads etc we pay for our own wheelie bins .. And up keep of our estates . Try nationalising our oil and FAS finds there’s 1.6 trillion to be tapped if you Morons with wake up . Your pushing the people to the point of revolution.

IF unemployment is down, it is for the simple reason that many unemployed people have LEFT THE COUNTRY. It is not something to be proud of.

Although strangely there is less suicide in poorer countries – personally I blame the lack of sunshine ;)

@ David, – are you specializing in ‘imaginary numbers’ by any chance..??

Whoever abolishes the Household Tax and equalises the daft Car Tax will win the next election.

You have never been able to find it, but you can guarantee its value?

Interesting.

I cant guarantee its value but I can guarantee that its value is nowhere near €21,440, its simple maths, you should try it

See my above definition of disposable income. The CSO doesn’t deal in makey-uppey statistics like the Credit Union’s “How much is left in me bank account at the end of the month”.

It’s not a social study, it’s a study of the net income of a person/household.

So what they are saying is that the total disposable income (cash they actually get at the end of it all) of half the population is 18,148 or less.

What maths? You’re just picking a number out of thin air. I would think that there is’nt many working people on much less than that after tax.

yes, but its and average, so its not a realistic indication of the economic state of the local economy, even with your definition of disposable income, if you want to continue using averages, lets say an ‘average’ household with 2 children in school, mortgage and most likely a hefty personal debt on cars or other items, it still leave a very small figure, im sorry you dont see the cso figures as mythical, but in the context of relevancy these averages mean nothing, for the normal person struggling to pay bills, the credit unions findings are the reality

you thinking that and it being the case are two different things james, the maths i refer to is statistics, whereby the mode in cases of national statistics is almost always well below the average, for someone that claims to have an engineering degree, one would assume you would know that

If you’re on minimum wage, after tax you’ll take home about €15-16k a year. So anything over that you’re getting pretty close to that average figure. Yes you’re right, it’s a engineering degree not an economic one.

for which you need a minimum higher standard of maths, statistics are covered in second level, you would have had to study them to attain the minimum entry requirement for an engineering degree

Well Simian

The Credit Union movement produced a report recently showing that a sizeable proportion of the population have €50 per week or less after paying household bills.

Therefore saying “I guarantee you the mode disposable income is nowhere near €20k pa”, is very accurate. The only way to prove it would be to have CSO provide the mode, which they won’t.

Also using the mean or average to describe disposable income actually hides great disparities in income levels. For example assume the following
10% have 250K, 10% have 225K 10% have 175K and the remaining 70% have 50K.
The Mean or Average is €100K, yet 70% have an income 1/2 that of the Average.

The problem with the politicians we elect and with the way we are taught maths (in some cases by failed teachers who become politicians), is that the vast majority do not understand Mean, Mode & Median. Therefore they and we relay in the Average, which as you can see, can produce numbers that bear no relation to what is the reality for the vast majority.

@Carcu Sidub – You are comparing apples and oranges here. The Credit Union report talks about discretionary income, which is the money leftover once all bills are paid. The CSO report is about disposable income, which is the money you have before bills, rent etc are paid. Disposable income will always be dramatically higher than discretionary income.

@yellow elk, fair point, i did confuse the two, however, the point about the cso never disclosing the mode of these figures stands, it is by any definition a more accurate picture of the economic health of the state

@Revolting Peasant

That may be the case, and they’re certainly at risk of poverty. If these people were in the states, they could go to a court and say – ‘look what I earn, look what I owe’ … ‘you are bankrupt. no credit for a few years. pay x per month your creditors and let them swing for the rest’ *bang* ‘next case …’

But to avoid getting sidetracked, the nutshell of this report is that:
1. Half of adult individuals in this country earn less than 18,148 per annum (includes benefits such as rent allowance paid on their behalf)
2. 16% of individuals are at risk of poverty (defined as having 60% of the median income)

This means that 16% of individuals had a disposable (net including social transfers) income of less than 10,888 euros. Now a single person on the dole, renting with rent allowance would be on more than that, so it’s skewed slightly by people living at home with half the dole. However, presumably that affects poverty in their parents too so it balances out.

So in 2011, 16% of individuals had a disposable income of less than 10,888
In 2010, 14.7% of individuals had a disposable income of less than 11,155
In 2009, 14.1% of individuals had a disposable income of less than 12,064

Hazard a guess for 2012? 2013? after cuts to rent allowance, childrens allowance, etc? 20% of individuals under 10,000 euro? Could easily happen.

Social transfers have seen the most movement since 2008:

1. To the wealthier sections of society (these people have a net social transfer out)
- PRSI used to be capped at 52,000 gross income; now they pay the 4% (or whatever) on all income
- The 2% Health Levy evolved along with the income levy into 7/10% USC
So someone pays 11% additional marginal tax out now, on everything over 52K
2. To the poorest sections of society (these people have a net social transfer in)
- Reduced rent allowance
- Reduced children’s allowance
- Reduced social welfare (rates and christmas double payment gone)
The effects are shown in this report, with more people at risk of poverty every year

So, in balance, a lot has been done to redress the balance of income, particularly on those earning over 52K, but the government is still struggling to maintain living standards for the poorest half of the country, with more people slipping into risk of poverty. This is the reality of a country running a deficit.

Yellow

Which is exactly why CSO use disposable income. It hides even more and bears no relevance to reality.

@Rónán, that is part of a different argument as in ‘could wealth distribution be fairer’ for example, as opposed to ‘why don’t they ever publish the mode?’

Why the obsession with the mode though? In a continuous distribution, the mode is the peak. Considering an income distribution graph only goes up, all that tells you is what the richest person in Ireland has for disposable income? Might I suggest a glossy magazine if you want to obsess over the top few people in Ireland?

What I would like to see is values for deciles, or various interesting percentiles. All I have from the report is the median (50th percentile), and the 16th percentile (the proposed at risk of poverty line). The CSO does present this type of information with respect to gross income, but based on taxable units.

I’d be very interested to see the 80th and 90th percentile over the past 5 years, as this would give a very good indication of the net effect of social transfers on the disposable income of that cohort, giving a true indication of the impact of recent measures. I suspect the distribution of disposable income in Ireland to be pretty arithmetic up to the 90th, before shooting up dramatically

The mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data which in this case is relevant to the spending power of the population, it gives no indication of the highest salaries, also comparing incomes 20 years ago is only slightly more relevant than comparing with 100 years ago, it is a favourite tactic of finance ministers to try and paint the latest round of cuts in a better light, “sure this is more than it was 2 decades ago”???

@Revolting Peasant

The mode as you understand it applies to a discrete set of data. Given the sheer number of individuals in the country (millions) the distribution of income can only be modelled continuously.

The mode is the exact discrete value which is most common among the data set. So if you were modelling the disposable income of your 5 best friends, and they had {10,000;11,000;12,000;15,000;18,000} respectively, what is the mode? The occurrence of each value in the set is unique, therefore there is no mode i.e. there is no disposable income amount which occurs more frequently than the rest. Therefore it is only relevant to consider average, median and variance in that distribution set.

Scale that up to millions of people, and sure you may get some people who just happen to have the exact same income, but you NEVER model that number of values discretely. Rather, you model it continuously, and for a continuous distribution you assume all values to be unique, if only by infinitesimal amounts. So one guys income of 12,000 euro is presented as different to the next’s 12,000.0000000005. The mode then becomes meaningless in this continuous distribution sample, as no salary occurs the most.

You could try to discretize the data, by rounding up and down salaries, but this would still give you nothing meaningful.

You’re trying to attribute to a conspiracy the lack of a statistical value which is wholly irrelevant considering the size and shape of what is a continuous distribution.

You should be looking for the information in deciles, as in 10% of people earn under this; 20% of people earn under this; …. 90% of people earn under this.

… that would allow you to make statements like, for example:
- 20% of the country have disposable incomes between 18,000 (the median, 50th percentile) and 30,000 (the 70th percentile)
- 20% of the country have disposable incomes between 14,500 (the 30th percentile) and 18,000 (the 50th)
[figures made up to illustrate]

This is how you analyse a large set of data. The Mode is the peak of the graph for a continuously modeled variable, and the nature of income distribution puts the peak at the top – the highest salary. This is why no-one presents the mode in the data you’re looking at.

Peasant, if you’re so smart why are you so poor?

you make it sound like its astronomical figures, when in reality there are less than 2 million people working here, of course the data is not discrete but it is certainly possible to catagorise, even if it was in 10k increments, 5k would be better but it would still give a much clearer picture of the spending power as it would certainly fall below 30k wage for the mode instead of above it for the average wage, for example, if you take the total population that has any income and use €5k sets €0-€4999, €5000-€9,999, €10,000-€1,499 and so forth up to the highest salary in the country, you will find that the mode (by a large margin numerically) lies somewhere between 15 and 30k, yet the average wage falls above this figure, the mode is relevant and perfectly calculable, you show little understanding if you think it cant be calculated

relevant point james as usual, lets see what you did? you took advantage of the generosity of the people of this country by going to college during the boom, when everyone else was paying for your education and there were plenty of jobs available, then as soon as you could you legged it to the uk to pay your tax over there and come on here to sneer at those you took advantage of, leech isnt strong enough of a word for you

Aaaarrrgghhh. This debate is possibly one of the most inane I’ve ever read on the journal. Mode is not the highest value- it is the value appearing most often. Disposable income is hugely different to discretionary income. The govt is spending about 30% more than it takes in and you still have idiots who think we should be spending more. And even more idiots who can’t connect the dots between increased rents and cost of living with increased govt handouts – in other words decrease the landlords dole (rent allowance) and rents will drop. People realise that austerity takes money out of the economy but they completely miss the fact that the interest payments on the increased borrowings will end up taking vastly more money out of the economy. People wish to exit the euro because it would give the option to devalue – but they are clueless that devaluation means that everyone us forced to take a pay cut. But then these are the same people who are ideologically opposed to pay cuts. And then you have others who don’t realise that if everyone takes a pay cut then nobody takes a pay cut.

I despair.

If you’re stepping away from cumulative distribution and discretizing the data into intervals, then you can at best estimate a mode based on whatever intervals you might choose to create. I fail to see how this can be meaningful.

You will most likely have many peaks in the distribution (though not necessarily the exact same) and so it will be multi-modal, making any assertion of one of these peaks as a mode meaningless. If you wish to have a modal interval, for any set of intervals you propose, the histogram can produce a different modal interval.

If i choose 0-50K, 50-100K, …. etc, it’s clear that here will be one winner. If I go down to 0-5k, 5-10k, 10-15k, … I’m likely to produce a multitude of peaks in the curve of the distribution among those intervals, making plucking the absolute largest interval statistically meaningless.

This is why a cumulative distribution function and quartiles/deciles/percentiles give a better idea of income distribution. I can see that 50% of people have incomes between 1st quartile and the 3rd quartile, etc.

Peasant: I paid tax for years so I think I was entitled to it and I didn’t go to college during the boom, I done it when I was made unemployed in 2008 to give myself better chances of getting a good job. I havent run away either, I’m just getting experience until I come back. Theyre not really hiring grads at the moment. Sorry about not sitting on my arse and complaining how it’s all not fair.

Don’t forget that the dept of social “protection” has also stopped one off grant towards religious cermonies. Meaning, families dependent on social welfare, the ones with the lowest incomes, will no longer receive a grant towards communions and confirmations. Yet another blow to the weakest in society.

no multitude of peaks, the peaks will be centred around 2 figures, the number of people of welfare will be one and the number of people on slightly higher than minimum wage will be another, it will decrease slowly up the 30k mark after which it will fall more rapidly the higher the salary set, you insist on over-complicating a simple set of figures, any first-year computer science student could put together a program to sort this data in no time, there is no reason the graph should be anything like the shape you describe, it is continuous data in exactly the same way as you are using continuous data to get your average and median, therefore it is just as easily analysed

lies james, you tell a different story every time your on here

I’m 29 and started an electrical apprenticeship 19, done that till I was 24, made unemployed, tried other things (didn’t work out), went to college (as was told by the government to do, to up skill for all the new jobs we would have) and here I am now. Call it lies if you want to make yourself feel better if you like, it’s no skin off my back. I bet it’s a lot easier to sit on the dole at home with family and friends.

@ James. Brilliant. He is just a loudmouth.

@ Eddie. The idea of the state paying only for Christian religious celebrations is totally inappropriate in 2013. And anyway since when was a religious ceremony about money?

Peasant I have a masters in software engineering, a degree in computer science, and I learned and gave stats grinds in college, in probability distributions and queuing theory. I also have 8 years experience as a software engineer.

So, I can assure you this is not mathematically difficult for me.

Mode is not automagically an improvement on mean and median. It gives additional and more appropriate info in certain distributions and sample sets, but it is not always a suitable measure. It adds nothing here due to the very large irregular sample size, and the cumulative distribution function here has no mode.

I repeat, for the final time, that no-one is hiding the mode from you. Try get a mode for the uk disposable income from whoever compiles their stats. You won’t find an official measure, because it’s not statistically significant and would produce different results under different intervals.

You seem to know how to calculate modal intervals, why not FOI the data and work it out yourself? Let us know your revelations

He has gone very quiet now Ronan.

Hope your communications teacher/ lecturer corrected all the ” dones” in your academic writing !! From a non failed teacher as all the commenters assume teachers to be – very irritating !

@james for all the “dones” !!

Is there a grant maybe, you should get onto the social, thats inhumane man

its because they use ‘average’, averages are always skewed by outliers, for example, if you take a sample of 10 people, 9 of which have no income and 1 has 1 million income, then their average income is 100k, it gives no indication of the spending power of the sample

I was thinking the same thing. After rent, bills and food shopping every week I have about a tenner spare. I dont smoke or drink, i don’t go out on the weekends. I’ve certainly never had that amount as a yearly wage let alone disposable income. That survey is a joke!!

Usually in situations like this, outliers are ignored and they either disregard that person or sample a different person. At least thats what we’re taught in Project Maths HL..

look at the figures, there’s no way the outliers are ignored here, or is there 1.5 million people here earning €50k pa? i don’t think so, do you know anyone with €400 a week disposable income? I think i know maybe 3 people on that kind of income

@Evelyn,

Don’t confuse the definition of ‘disposable’ in this case. Your rent, bills and food come out of your ‘disposable’ income by this definition. It isn’t ‘money leftover at the end of the month to do with as you please’.

Disposable Income is:
Gross Income – Tax +/- Net social contributions

Net social contributions is your position after paying PRSI and USC but receiving anything like income supplement, the dole, childrens allowance, rent allowance etc.

What ‘disposable income’ really means, is your true net income (Net pay + any benefits you receive)

what then are ‘inter-household cash payments’? do they not refer to accommodation, food and fuel?

@Revolting – You seem to be confusing disposable income (after-tax income) and discretionary income (disposable income minus typical expenses like bills, rent, food, etc.).

who red thumbs that comment?

Carl, read the report. There’s a scale involved here ranging from well-off to comfortable to getting by to deprived to poverty. You’re citing poverty and saying the report’s invalid because it reported on every category?
Nonsense.

Oh don’t be ridiculous. We’re talking about being able to afford to have a couple of people over to your place for a meal or a drink ONCE A MONTH. That’s hardly a lavish lifestyle.

No, it’s not the kind of deprivation that people experience in the developing world. But that doesn’t make it okay.

Can’t afford food for days or weeks?! There’s no logic to comparing us to the likes of Africa.

U have very low expectation in life Karl.

Match this against report of who added to there wealth in 10 – 11.
The transfer of wealth from the many to the few is clear to see.
When will people realise this system spouted as Democracy/ capitalism is a farce, the rules in place don’t mean anything if regulation is a joke. Proof google Barclays bank, look under Credit swaps. PPI and Libor frauds, To name but a few, all the big banks ALL of them are, these have increased your loan repayments, if u have any type of loan then u suffered via libor.
Not to mention the deals done with drug cartels to clean money.
Time to wake up! & realise u are a pawn/slave to those who control the system, and they don’t give a flying fook about u, your family or your country.
Wake up!

Tony Groome , how can you take money from people who do not have it?

I’m saying that being able to buy new furniture or go on the piss with your mates are NOT benchmarks of poverty and to use them as such are absolutely laughable. The report is a joke. As for the “Us vs Africa” argument the people are of Africa are actually deprived that is what “Deprivation” is, not being unable to take a trip to Ikea to update the interior design of your flat or go for a few ciders with your mates.

What’s a benchmark of poverty then carl?

And poverty in ireland. Not India / or Pakistan or the when you were growing up or the middle ages but a current developed western economy.

I totally agree with Mr. Douglas. The indicators used seem to be luxuries rather than necessities. At the same time, though, deprivation is generally viewed in relative rather than absolute terms so that if I find that I can afford only one rather than two skiing trips a years, I might well consider myself deprived. Basically, those are those who feel the pinch and the need to tighten their belts, but there are other with no belts to tighten.

Good grief. Doesn’t anyone read the definitions in the report before complaining about them?

It’s not a question of not reading the definitions but of whether being able to buy new furniture or having a few jars a couple of times a week or having people over for dinner are “generally considered necessary” in today’s world. They may be all desirable, but having to forsake those pleasures hardly constitutes destitution. And getting on a Ryanair flight, horrible though it might be, to get work overseas is not quite the same as being force off your land and put on a coffin ship to North America.

Us v Africa , interesting because there are many in the USA who are as food insecure as those living in Africa … Well that’s America for you :(

A professional member of Young Fine Gael, indeed he is.

Averaging out the amounts earned. Eg. you earn 2k a month after taxes, your wife earns 2.5k; the report assumes you pool your money to get by on so there’s an inter-household payment of 0.25k per month.

It’s a fancy way of saying “average”.

Unless they’ve something buried in the back of the report that I missed.

Good question. It appears to be money given to other members of your family – pocket money to kids etc?

Disposable income is usually defined as your after tax income.

Mark’s explanation makes more sense!

Mark and Vincent, that would be intra-household. Inter-household would be between or among households. That’s more like getting money from your parents, or giving money to your retired parents in a different household.

That makes sense Ronan, but I wish they’d been clearer in the report…

Or perhaps child support payments re separated families? I wish it was clearer.

Is there any way of requesting that the CSO release mode figures? I hadn’t understood the huge difference they make until I read your various comments here. Thanks for explaining it!

You’re minted now Sandy! Any chance of a loan?

Yea, we’ll split it 50/50.
I don’t think those thumbs down will pay up though.

there are always queues around population hubs in every country, liffey vally has a massive catchment area, try finding a queue in the town where I live, i dont know how a lot of the businesses are staying open

Ah Tom come on , myself and wife have about €12 a week left over , we save that and at the end of each month go to cinema or take the child out for a meal , and i,LL not give that up just to satisfy an Irish politician , so a bit hard on those cinema goers many are prob in the same boat , however come the next budget i won,t even have enough money for that ,

Far be it for me to say that everything is grand but I think many people are making a cinema trip more expensive than it should be.

I go to the cinema at least twice a week and it always bewilders me how many people A) go to see 3D films when there is often a 2D showing of the same film and B) stock up on oversized buckets of horrible mass produced popcorn and coke.

3D is just a load of old wank so don’t pay more for it and don’t buy any overpriced food. Did you come to the cinema to watch or eat? Just give me a 2D ticket and I the bottle of water I sneaked in, that’s all a cinema trip costs.

Tom your argument is flawed. I think it would be harder to see the effects of poverty than it is to see those who still have some disposable income going to some eatery. People who are suffering financially are far more likely to be found in their home’s under blankets clinging to each other for warmth, in a housing estate far removed from the likes of liffey valley (ie away from the public eye)…

*sample