As the BOTOX ECONOMY was laid bare and the financial filler of other people's money became evident, the JAGGERS, JUGGLERS and BONO BOOMERS struggled to maintain their slice of a diminished pie. However the author saw a possible solution to Ireland's quandaries. Taking a trip around the globe from Shanghai to New York, from Latin America to Central Europe, he says we can learn from history and appreciate that Ireland has a unique economic resource: OUR GLOBAL TRIBE. If we exploit the demographic potential of the Diaspora, we can re-invigorate the nation. The prosperity of future Irish generations is based on harnessing the collective power of past generations. This is the global GENERATION GAME.

After ten years of a boom and on the eve of a downturn, Irish society has been turned on its head by a Generation War. The clear winners have been the middle-aged Jagger Generation, enormously enriched by the property boom, while the younger generation – the cash-stripped Jugglers – will be badly exposed as the credit wave recedes. Then there are the Bono Boomers, wedged between the winners and losers, who are not about to grow up just because the economy is doing badly, preferring instead to enjoy life as permalescents – a permanently adolescent generation, too young to be old, too old to be hip. As the Jaggers, Jugglers and Bono Boomers struggle to maintain their slice of a diminished pie, David McWilliams explains how it's time to take stock, learn from history and harness the collective power of past generations. He argues that if Ireland can exploit its unique ecomonic resource – it's global tribe – Ireland as a nation will be reinvigorated. He believes that now is the time to play the Generation Game.

A forensic, entertaining polemic from the author of The Pope's Children. Ireland is deeply in debt, beholden to the IMF, the EU and the bond markets. Its economy is frozen, and years of austerity are ahead. It didn't have to be this way - and it doesn't have to be this way. In The Good Room, David McWilliams, who spotted the dangers of the Irish property bubble and imbalances within the eurozone at a time when other commentators were cheerleading the boom, explains the bizarre economics behind Ireland's current predicament, and illuminates a different path for the country. He illustrates the consequences of debt and austerity for ordinary Irish people and explains why austerity can't work. And he shows that history offers numerous useful models for Irish recovery - provided we open our eyes to them. Economics is about people like you. The Pope's Children was the book that connected the dots between economics and daily life in Ireland during the boom years. The Good Room does the same for the Ireland of the bust, and is - in its call for a completely different approach - an even more urgent and necessary work. 'McWilliams has a great knack for bringing a complex economics story to life. He is also funny. In economics, that's a rare and persuasive combination.' Stephanie Flanders, Irish Times 'A gifted and often courageous polemicist who has done more to popularize the debate about economics in Ireland than anyone else' Irish Independent 'McWilliams makes a compelling argument for the need for a different approach to Irish and European economic management ... [A] realistic, pragmatic call for innovative policies that take account of proven economic theory' Sunday Business Post David McWilliams is Ireland's leading popular economist, and a columnist for the Irish Independent and the Sunday Business Post. He is the author of the bestsellers The Pope's Children, The Generation Game, and Follow the Money.

Named for the ironic coincidence of the Irish baby boom of the 1970s, which peaked nine months to the day after Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Dublin, The Pope’s Children is both a celebration and bitingly funny portrait of the first generation of the Celtic Tiger—the beneficiaries of the economic miracle that propelled Ireland from centuries of deprivation into a nation that now enjoys one of the highest living standards in the world.

Meet The Pope's Children, the beneficiaries of Wonderbra Economics. This is the special generation, the Irish baby boom of the 1970s that peaked nine months to the day after the Pope's visit. There are 620,000 of them, squeezed into the middle and lifted up by the Expectocracy. Ireland is blurring. Out of this haze has come the Full-on Nation, the most hedonisitic generation ever. David McWilliams' brilliant research and analysis of Ireland is a celebration of success. In an easy-to-read style, he takes us to Deckland, that suburban state of mind where you will find the Kells Angels, Breakfast Roll Man, Low GI Jane and RoboPaddy. Come face to face with the You're a Star generation, Billy Bunker, fair-trade Frank, Carrot Juice Contrarians and Bouncy Castle Brendan. We also meet the HiCos, Hibernian Cosmopolitans, the new elite whose distance from Deckland is measured by appreciations and cultivations that Deckland's rampant credit just can't buy. Entertaining and informative, The Pope's Children told of the vast surge of ambition, money, optimisim and hope in Ireland during the boom.

Renaissance Nation is the story of how the Pope's Children rewrote the rules for Ireland.In four decades, bookended by the visits of the pope in September 1979 and August 2018, Ireland has managed to become one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world.Here David McWilliams presents the story of modern Ireland and how, once we threw off the shackles and replaced the torpor of collective dogma with the vibrancy of individual freedom, the economy too started to motor.Meet the everyman revolutionaries who made it all happen, heroes like Sliotar Mom and Flat White Man. Feel the pulse of the Radical Centre and celebrate the optimism of a tolerant, accepting, 'live and let live' nation.In a world where other nations are divided, their economies stalled, lurching to the extremes, convulsed by existential fights pitting one part of the population against the other, Renaissance Nation shows how a well off, relatively chilled Ireland, with a growing economy and surfing a wave of liberal optimism, may not be perfect, but it isn't a bad place to be.A triumph of popular economics and social history, this is the story of how, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent middle class carried off something extraordinary – a quiet revolution – and with it, reshaped our national destiny.