The David McWilliams Podcast

By David McWilliams & John Davis

The aim of this weekly podcast is to make economics easy, uncomplicated and accessible. With the world at a political, technological and financial tipping point, economics has never been so importa

... more

4.6

221221 ratings

Download on the App Store

Download on the App Store

Get it on Google Play

FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 656 episodes available.

The David McWilliams Podcast episodes:

April 15, 2026 Is Ireland the Worst-Run Rich Country in Europe?
Ireland looks like a success story on paper: booming tax revenues, record public spending, and a global reputation as a modern, wealthy economy. Yet on the ground, something feels deeply off. In this episode, we step back from the noise of protests, strikes, and rising fuel costs to ask how can a country with so much money deliver so little? From housing and healthcare to transport and infrastructure, the pattern is the same, soaring budgets, missed targets, and no consequences. We explore the idea that this is an insidious system where incentives are broken, accountability is absent, and a permanent “Mandarin class” operates behind the scenes, untouched by elections or outcomes. The result is an economy where public spending fuels inflation, squeezes workers, and hollows out the productive sector. This has graduated from a left-versus-right story to a question of care versus contempt. Unless that changes, Ireland risks squandering a once-in-a-generation windfall while the cracks in the system grow wider.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
44min
April 14, 2026 The Housing Finale: Can Ireland Build Its Way Out?
After two episodes on how Ireland’s housing market became so brittle, we get to the only question that matters: how do you actually fix it? In this final part of our housing series with Ronan Lyons, we move from diagnosis to prescription. If the crisis was built over decades through bad incentives, bad planning, weak population forecasting, and a deep bias against density, what would it take to reverse it? We talk about viability, tax incentives, apartments, one-off housing, planning reform, and the hard truth that Ireland cannot solve this crisis with slogans, targets, or recycled talking points. It needs a system that matches the way people actually live now: smaller households, urban jobs, rising population, and huge pent-up demand. This is the finale of the series, so we pull the threads together. Not just what went wrong, but what a serious housing strategy would look like if the country finally decided to stop managing decline and start building for the future.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
38min
April 09, 2026 How The Housing Market Was Designed to Fail - Part 2
In this second episode with Ronan Lyons, we wonder how did a country that once struggled to keep its people end up unable to house them? The answer is a story of unintended consequences. Population booms that were visible but ignored, tax incentives that pushed homes into the wrong places, a planning system that feared apartments and subsidised sprawl and a country that urbanised its jobs, but never its housing. Along the way, we unpack the myth that the crisis began in 2008, that credit is the main culprit, that Ireland is uniquely obsessed with homeownership. Instead, what emerges is something more unsettling, a system shaped over decades by reasonable decisions that, taken together, produced something deeply dysfunctional. Across the Western world, housing markets are showing the same cracks. If you understand how the system was built, you realise just how hard it will be to fix.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
44min
April 07, 2026 The Brittle Housing Market: Why the System Is Worse Than You Think - Part 1
Housing is the biggest expense most of us will ever face, and across Ireland and much of the Western world, the system simply isn’t working. Is this another housing bubble, or something more dangerous? In this first episode of a special three-part series on housing, we sit down with Trinity College economist Ronan Lyons to unpack what’s really happening beneath the headlines. Lyons argues the problem isn’t a speculative bubble like the 2000s. Instead, we’re living in a “brittle” housing system, one where pressure has quietly built for years because societies simply aren’t building the right homes in the right places for the way people live today. This means young people stuck living with parents, sharing overcrowded homes, or emigrating to start their lives elsewhere. We explore how focusing only on prices and rents misses the real issue, why housing shortages are now appearing across Europe and the English-speaking world, and how demographic change is colliding with planning systems designed for a different era. Part one asks the key question: Where are we now?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
36min
April 02, 2026 The Next Global Recession?
What does Muhammad Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle have to do with the next global recession? In this episode, we go back to the 1970s oil shocks, when a geopolitical crisis sent energy prices soaring, wealth flooding into oil states, and Western economies into deep recession. The pattern is striking: in 1973, 1979, 1990, and even before the 2008 crash, surging oil prices were followed by collapsing growth, falling trade, and rising unemployment. The numbers are brutal. Global growth fell from 6% to 1.4% in the mid-1970s. Trade swung from double-digit expansion to contraction. In Ireland, inflation hit over 20% and recovery took years. Each time, even when oil prices fell back, the damage stuck, factories closed, jobs disappeared, and economies never fully reset. Now it’s happening again. Another oil shock, another geopolitical crisis, and the same underlying vulnerability: we are still deeply dependent on fossil fuels. Ireland is now among the most energy-dependent countries in Europe, with some of the highest electricity costs in the EU. If every oil shock in modern history has triggered a recession, why would this time be any different? Who’s on the ropes now, and who’s about to take the hit?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
45min
March 31, 2026 Did Big Tech Ruin the Internet? with Cory Doctorow
What happened to the internet? Why did the platforms that once felt useful, fun and liberating become manipulative, cluttered and hostile? In this episode, we talk to writer, activist and digital theorist Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term enshittification, about how tech platforms decay: first they are good to users, then they are good to business customers, and finally they become good only to shareholders and executives. From Facebook and Instagram to Amazon, ad fraud, app lock-in, monopoly power and the slow death of the high street, this is a conversation about how digital capitalism corrodes the things we rely on. But it is also about what can be done, why regulators failed, how political will may be shifting, and why the fight against corporate power is suddenly back on the table.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
40min
March 26, 2026 Is the West Losing Africa to China?
South Africa is one of the places where the 21st century is being made in real time. Against the backdrop of war in the Middle East, we ask what rising energy prices mean for countries already struggling with poverty, unemployment and fragile infrastructure. If you want to see the decline of American influence and the rise of Chinese power, Southern Africa is where it’s happening. Along the way, we get a street-level feel for modern South Africa, from the fading grandeur of central Joburg to the sprawling reality of Soweto, where apartheid’s legacy still shapes daily life, but where democracy has also held in ways many once thought impossible. We talk about inequality, migration, religion, corruption, black economic empowerment, and the strange new elite of “slay queens,” all as windows into how power and money now move through South African society. With exploding population growth, vast mineral wealth, and huge renewable energy potential, the continent is becoming central to the global economy. China understands that. The West, increasingly, does not.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
45min
March 24, 2026 Why Some Countries Create Jobs and Others Export People
Broadcasting from South Africa, a country of huge energy, huge potential, and brutally high unemployment, we use that lens to ask what actually creates jobs? From there, we go back to Ireland in 1990, when employment had barely moved in forty years and emigration still felt like the national destiny. So what changed? We unpack the extraordinary shift that turned Ireland from an economy exporting its young people into one of the strongest job creators in Europe: devaluation, falling interest rates, the Berlin Wall dividend, peace in the North, American investment, and a transformed national mood. Politicians love talking about “job creation,” yet jobs are not created by speeches, slogans, or government press releases. Jobs come after demand, after sales, after risk, after somebody decides to build something, sell something, and back themselves. In other words: jobs are derived from entrepreneurship.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
41min
March 19, 2026 Shedonomics: Can Europe Survive China’s Manufacturing Machine?
In this episode, we unpack the new China shock, as exports to Europe surge nearly 30% in just two months and a €359 billion trade deficit keeps widening. From electric cars to fast fashion, Chinese firms are flooding markets with cheaper, faster, and increasingly better products, and Europe is struggling to respond. The real story is actually stranger. We dive into the rise of the “parcel economy,” where billions of low-value packages bypass traditional retail, and the even more surreal “shed economy,” where informal logistics networks are quietly distributing Chinese goods across Europe. Can Europe still produce anything at all? If one country can make everything cheaper, what’s left for everyone else? And if trade stops being two-way, does free trade itself break down? Was Trump right all along?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
37min
March 17, 2026 St Patrick's Day Special: Who Exactly Are The Irish Americans?
On St. Patrick’s Day, we go beyond the parades and pints to ask: what does the Irish diaspora actually mean for Ireland today? From the Presbyterian migrants who helped shape revolutionary America, to the famine generation who built the unions, churches, police forces, and political machines of the great US cities, this episode traces the long economic story of Irish emigration and Irish America. However, this is also about the present, is there still such a thing as a coherent Irish America, or has it dissolved into the wider American mainstream? If the old bonds are fading, should Ireland be doing far more to reconnect with the tribe abroad? On a day when Ireland celebrates itself to the world, we ask what the diaspora gave us, what remains of that identity now, and how a small country might think much bigger about one of its greatest global assets.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
...more
52min

FAQs about The David McWilliams Podcast:

How many episodes does The David McWilliams Podcast have?

The podcast currently has 656 episodes available.

More shows like The David McWilliams Podcast

The Second Captains Podcast by Second Captains

The Second Captains Podcast

183 Listeners

The Last Word with Matt Cooper by Today FM

The Last Word with Matt Cooper

60 Listeners

Callan's Kicks by RTÉ Radio 1

Callan's Kicks

61 Listeners

Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan by The Irish Times

Inside Politics with Hugh Linehan

143 Listeners

The Pat Kenny Show by Newstalk

The Pat Kenny Show

57 Listeners

Brendan O'Connor by RTÉ Radio 1

Brendan O'Connor

89 Listeners

Today with David McCullagh by RTÉ Radio 1

Today with David McCullagh

37 Listeners

Crime World by Crime World

Crime World

261 Listeners

The Other Hand by Jim Power & Chris Johns

The Other Hand

44 Listeners

The Mario Rosenstock Podcast by Mario Rosenstock

The Mario Rosenstock Podcast

23 Listeners

In The News by The Irish Times

In The News

51 Listeners

The Indo Daily by Irish Independent

The Indo Daily

109 Listeners

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning by Gold Hat Productions

Free State with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning

75 Listeners

Path to Power by Matt Cooper

Path to Power

23 Listeners

Indo Sport by Irish Independent

Indo Sport

53 Listeners