05 Review Article

Interrogating Irish Policies draws together 10 of the author’s papers published between 1976 and 2006 and adds a concluding chapter written specially for this volume. It provides a fascinating and thoroughly unique perspective on a range of important issues that are normally dealt with in isolation (when considered at all). Amongst these are how innovative lawmaking can substitute for microeconomic intervention, and why the latter is almost invariably chosen in Ireland; the appropriate role of the public sector bureaucracy and how it can be re-engineered to function more efficiently; and aspects of Irish STI (science, technology and innovation) policy, and particularly how innovative treatment of Intellectual Property issues can be used to expand the level of commercial innovation in Ireland. In the author’s world view, these seemingly diverse issues form a coherent whole. The current debate on public-sector efficiency and the massive increase in Irish STI funding over recent years combine to make the present volume both timely and valuable. Having completed an MA in History at UCD, Bill Kingston came to the Trinity College School of Business in 1969, courtesy of a research fellowship awarded to expand a research paper on “Invention and Monopoly” into his first book. Since then his focus has been on entrepreneurship (including unproductive entrepreneurship, i.e. rent seeking), innovation and intellectual property rights. The writing of that paper and his move into the arena of economics and political science were stimulated by his encounter with the writings of Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s star has of course risen in recent times as his work on “creative destruction” has been followed up by evolutionary economists like Nelson and Winter and endogenous growth theorists such as Aghion and Howitt. Indeed, Nobel laureate Robert Solow – whose macroeconomics is largely Keynesian – has recently remarked that “today, some sixty years after their deaths, Schumpeter’s star probably outshines Keynes’s.”1 Schumpeter remains the economist most cited by Kingston.