The David McWilliams Podcast

Around the world, people feel poorer, even when the numbers say we’ve never been richer. In Ireland, GDP is soaring, household wealth has more than doubled since 2014, and yet most families are pinned to their collar. Why? Because the official poverty line is €33,600, but it now takes at least €52,000 a year just to stay afloat. That’s a 40% gap between what’s measured and what’s felt. Rent has passed €2,000 a month, groceries are up 16% in a year, childcare can cost over €1,000 monthly, and still we’re told the economy is “booming.” Inspired by Michael Green’s viral Substack and Kyla Scanlon’s “vibecession,” we unpack the growing chasm between income and cost, and how it’s fuelling backlash, burnout, and political blowback from New York to Newbridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re diving into the economics of borders, the lines we pretend are ancient but were mostly scratched into the earth by soldiers, surveyors and empire-builders with rulers. From Ukraine’s shifting frontlines to Dublin’s Herzog Park, to Northern Ireland’s uneasy edges, we trace how geography becomes politics. Then we go back to the original culprit: William Petty, Cromwell’s cartographer, the man who mapped Ireland in 13 months and turned land into an asset class. His Down Survey redrew Ireland and created the blueprint for colonialism, capitalism and the straight-line borders that still ignite conflict from Central Asia to the Middle East. We follow the rulers, the rebellions, the dispossession and the economics behind every “line in the sand.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to writer and analyst Dan Wang, whose book Breakneck argues that China is an engineering state, run by people who build, while America, Ireland and the wider Anglosphere have become lawyer states, run by people who litigate. China lays highways and high-speed rail at warp speed; common-law countries file objections and environmental reports. Europe, meanwhile, risks turning into a mausoleum economy with great croissants, beautiful cities, and a shrinking industrial base. We ask does China’s engineering mindset can deliver both stunning bridges and harsh social controls? Does a world of tariffs, security fears and cyber-fragility forces us to rethink who we let run the show: the builders or the barristers? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Leaving the US after weeks on the road, we zoom out from New York and Washington and asks a question we almost never ask in Europe: what if the real future of geopolitics isn’t in Brussels, Beijing or DC, but in Central Asia? To get there, we bring in historian Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads, to map the region we lazily call “the Stans”; Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, plus Afghanistan, Iran and their neighbours. Together we unpack why this vast strip of land, once the beating heart of the Silk Roads, is suddenly back at the centre of the global game: home to huge reserves of oil, gas, uranium, rare earths and critical minerals, a young and growing population, and wedged between Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran. We hear how Central Asian states are learning to play everyone off against everyone and why the new Great Game isn’t a neat East vs West story at all. If the world is getting more dangerous, more digital and more fragmented, what does it mean that Ireland is the EU’s weak link on defence, with tiny cyber budgets, under-protected seabed cables and a very cosy version of neutrality? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reporting from New York, with a Bitcoin slump at his heels and the Hollywood-launch buzz of Money: A Story of Humanity still in the air, we dive into one of the most important economic questions of 2025: why can America, Ireland, and Britain no longer build the infrastructure that made them great? From the riveted, soot-stained genius of the New York subway to China’s ability to throw up a hospital in ten days, we explore a new way of understanding global power: engineers vs. lawyers. Guided by Dan Wang’s Breakneck, we trace how China’s engineer-run state builds at breakneck speed while lawyer-dominated America litigates itself into paralysis, and how Ireland, with a Dáil stuffed with talkers rather than doers, finds itself in the same boat. We dig into the numbers, the politics, the personalities, and the quiet collapse of Western state capacity. If the people running your country don’t know how to build, how can the country itself ever hope to? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.