No secret to success

THANK you for affording James Cunningham the opportunity to alert your readers to the remarkable Irish public servant, Dr TK Whittaker, a man who was massively liable for catapulting a “little cabbage garden” into a remarkable success story with his “Programme(s) For Economic Expansion”.

To help with the perspective of just how poor Ireland was before that, consider that the school prescribed reading on Ireland’s place in the world was Butler’s Geography of Ireland, which stated unequivocally that the “island” had no gold, coal, diamonds et cetera, no natural resources whatsoever, giving rise to the joke: what do you call a 2 000-year-old Irishman? Peat! From which the country powered its electricity grid.

Dr Whittaker’s son was in university with us, and so we were fortunate to have the pleasure of knowing him, while at the same time reading his policy and thinking in the economics class of Prof James Meehan, who was a devout Keynesian.

The various failed policies condemning SA to no economic progress and low growth would certainly benefit from a précis or summary of prescribed reading of the programme(s), along with the input of former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and a consideration of the Hartz labour reforms, which were applied in Germany when a VW executive and adviser to former Chancellor Schröder presented a set of measures to reduce German unemployment.

None of the above are a secret, and with regard to South Africa, it is all simply maths where, if population growth is higher than economic growth, feel good factors, inspiration and symbolism will not stand up to the sum of (population growth), which is greater than (economic growth + automation + capital/entrepreneurial flight).

The least of our problems is having to create demand, unlike Japan, as we have this in insatiable quantities from the population, which require everything and, in fact, deserve better. Mise le Meas Cape Town