Professor Stephen Kinsella

Stephen Kinsella is Professor of Economics, Head of the Department of Economics, Co-Director of the UL's Immersive Software Engineering programme, and Research Associate at the Rhodes Centre for International Finance at Brown University.

His broad research areas are Macroeconomics, Economics for Business, Financial Economics, and has a keen interest in smart cities, new regional collaborations, economic networks, and in bringing thinking around natural capital into mainstream economic thinking.

Stephen is a member of the Irish Government's AI Advisory Council and an Economic Advisor to the Tánaiste, Simon Harris. He is a regular columnist across media organisations in Ireland, Europe and America and has twice been named Economic Commentator of the Year for his media work.

Stephen Kinsella, Professor of Economics, explains how economics just might be the key to overcoming real-world problems in a sustainable way. 

I'm an economist, which means I study society. I study how people interact with one another, and I guess the most important thing that we can do as researchers right now is think about how to create a more sustainable future. What I'm doing to be a small part of that in Limerick City is putting together a suite of smart society research projects, which actually asks people how they want to decarbonise, how they want to do the climate transition and how we as researchers, but also as the state, can actually help individuals and businesses decarbonise and save money on their energy bills and just generally live a better life.

Posing the right question

Being a researcher means knowing how to ask a specific kind of question. So you say, what would it look like if it was like this? You say, I am really curious about this area and I really want to get into it. And I have a specific way of doing that. And that's a really important point that as a researcher, what you learn in your training is how to ask these questions in a very specific way. And often we will delineate disciplines depending on how they ask certain questions. A sociologist might ask the same question as an economist, but get to a different answer. They use a different path. An engineer might ask the same question as an architect, but they'll get to the same place, but they'll take a different path. Being a researcher for me is about having the freedom to ask an ambiguous question.

You don't know the answer of the question that you're asking. It's the entire point of research, and then you find out something about the world and that's brilliant. That's really, really exciting. Before you asked the question, before you went through the years of trying to come up with an answer, no answer existed and now one does, and that's incredibly satisfying. It's sort of like building a wall and you've built this wall and at the end you look back and then the wall is built and there's a deep satisfaction from doing that. And I've been doing this now for 25 years and I don't particularly plan on stopping.

You know what to do. The reality is people have opinions, and they don't necessarily want somebody saying, we have the answer for you. You want the citizen to actually give you their view, and you want the citizen to in fact innovate themselves. You want the citizen to come up with a better idea than you have.

A lab but not what you think

And that's why we have the Citizen Innovation Lab. The Citizen Innovation Lab in Limerick City is a partnership between the University of Limerick and Limerick City and County Council, where we created a space digital and physical that people can come and talk about how they want to improve their own situations with respect to climate and sustainability. 

It's not just the state and the university and the council giving the citizen the solution. The citizens themselves are giving us the solutions and we're working with them and their community groups to create bespoke projects that work specifically for them, and they're taking ownership of the idea of decarbonizing. And that's really exciting because 20 years ago that wouldn't have existed. That concept wouldn't have existed, and now it does. And it doesn't just exist on some scientific library journal. It doesn't exist in some database somewhere. It exists in the real world in Limerick City today.

So I choose to kind of push at these things and I have spent my whole career designing new research programmes, designing new courses, writing books, writing articles, writing speeches, giving courses and everything else, just constantly asking why. The really interesting thing about economics is the answer changes unlike in physics or chemistry. If you ask why did those two atoms bond the way they do, you can get to a close room and closer and closer answer. In economics and most social sciences, the question says the same and the answers change. And that's a beautiful thing to think about as well.

The world in threes

There are only three problems really to solve in social science, climate change, migration, and ageing. Of those three, climate change is the one that's most amenable to technological solutions, and it's the one that's most pressing. If you want to think about the future of a city, you have to think about the future of a city in terms of climate change. What does it mean for the people of Limerick today? I'm not going anywhere. Limerick isn't going anywhere. It's very important that we situate climate change in its local context, and that's why I'm so focused on thinking about this in this way.

What it is now, it's kind of a corporatised buzzword, and that's fine. That's how all terms go, but it can mean everything from your fridge talking to you to the government, having massive amounts of data on you, and it has all the promise and all the peril of those things because data is power, and when you hand your data to somebody, you hand power to them. And it's a very important point that privacy researchers, some of whom I work with, have thought carefully about.

A smart city uses your data and other people's data to really understand behaviour and to change behaviour. This is the most important thing. The more data we use and the better we target it to people conditional on their privacy, of course, the better it's going to be for everybody. You'll have smarter, more sustainable solutions, you'll have smarter, more sustainable traffic, you'll have smarter, more sustainable buildings, and then you will have a more sustainable life.

I know I'm biased, but economics is probably the most important social science subject because it's a way of giving advice to the powerful. And it's a way of reminding everyone that we have constraints. We don't live within a planet that is unbounded in resources. We don't live within a world where everyone can get everything that they want. And so economics reminds us constantly that we have to make these choices and we even by not doing anything, we're making these choices. And it's really, really important that we find better ways to present these choices to people. We are not the ones who make those choices.

We are simply the ones who hand the hand decision makers these choices. And it's really important because when economists make mistakes, millions of people suffer. Millions of people suffer. It's an incredibly important discipline to study. I take, the reason I study economics is because when economists make mistakes, millions of people can suffer. If you do it properly, millions of people can prosper. I choose to try to study this stuff in a way that really helps people on the ground, and I'm really privileged to be able to do so.

Better in numbers

Economics alone is not going to get you to a smarter society. You need to work with architects, you need to work with engineers, you need to work with marketing professionals, you need to work with civil servants, you need to work with everybody. Essentially, you just bring one tiny slice of the pie, and it's an important slice. I believe it's the best slice, but it's not the only slice. And working across disciplines is very hard because you might say the same word, but you mean totally different things because your disciplines come from different places. You might be staring at the same thing, but see two totally different versions of that thing. And so dialogue is really important. Trust is really important. Mutual respect is really important. It's important that you look at an architect's way of seeing the world and consider that equally valid to an economist or an engineers and so forth. 

And each discipline brings something special, something unique, something extraordinarily valuable. And no one discipline is better than another, I suppose, although economics probably is. But no one discipline is better. Fundamentally, what is true is if you focus on what you intend to achieve, which is a better limerick city for the people of Limerick City, it's quite easy then to work with one another. And we've been really successful in getting Horizon Europe grants, SEAI grants, EPA grants many other kinds of grants in order to support our joint research. And that's been really good. And we don't plan on stopping.

Ideas are like elbows

You get satisfaction from having an idea and making it real. Everyone has ideas. Ideas are like elbows. Everybody's got them. What matters is making the idea real, implementing the idea in some way. It can be a mathematical model, it can be a simulation, it can be a project, putting sensors into people's homes. It can be an experiment, but you make an idea real using the discipline knowledge that you have. And I think the way that I think about it, the thing that excites me is the fact that we're never going to finish. It's always going to be new. It's always going to be interesting. And that kind of constantly evolving conversation. And maybe there are colleagues in the Positive City Exchange in Trondheim, Norway that have done it better, we'll take that, improve it, try to localise it. Maybe there's colleagues in Saudi Arabia that are doing it better, we'll take that, try to improve it and so forth. The conversation evolves and it's always a conversation of, Hey, I did this. Here's what was good, here's what was bad. You should have a go. And to the extent that you can be part of that conversation, it's a great way to live because whatever you're doing, you're adding to the corpus of human knowledge, and that's a pretty good way to spend a life.

I'm most proud of the relationships that I have with the people who I get to continually ask these questions with. These are relationships that have now lasted decades, we're mates. It's just a lovely way of working and I really look forward to doing it in the future.

And that's deeply, deeply satisfying, but it's a tiny little piece of a brick in the overall wall, but it's really nice to have it done. But I can still remember the moment when I went, right, yeah, okay. It has to be like this. There's no point in me explaining what it is. But it was very, very, very cool. It was a lovely moment, and it became the foundation for my academic career. And it really was after a series of all-nighters and being very sleep deprived and also under extreme pressure, I recommend extreme pressure to people, particularly when they're young.

Getting support is key

Mentoring has been incredibly important to me in my career. I wouldn't be here today without the mentors that I've had, some of whom don't even know that they're mentors, some of whom have been my formal mentors, my PhD advisors and so forth, some of whom have been senior colleagues, some of whom I just look at them and I go, I'd love to be like you. And I learned from watching them, and they don't even know that they're mentors of mine. But I have modelled my career on others, I have learned from others. I have gotten seriously positive and negative feedback from others. And now I am a mentor and I try to distil what I've learned both positively and negatively and give that back to people. It's something I take incredibly seriously. It's a really big part of my job now, and it's something that I hope to be able to continue to do fundamentally. You don't advance in this world unless you have good mentors. And if you are watching this and you don't feel like you have a good mentor, give me a shout. Thank You.

I think the reality of mentorship is it's a personal connection that you make with one person, or you may not even know them, but you might be learning from them. But UL tries to develop its staff as best it can, but it is itself always learning. And I think it's important to be open about that. The more we do of this, the better we get at it. The more we add to the mentorship journey, the better it becomes. And it is itself a process that the organisation is learning and applying and then learning and applying, and we kind of never get there. But that's not a bad thing.

You don't get anywhere unless you're well supported. UL is incredible with its research supports. The most important thing is when I have a problem, I just pick up the phone and I go, oh my God, I have this problem. And they go, don't worry. Calm down. We'll fix it. And you're well supported in your department, you're well supported in your faculty, you're well supported by the research office. You are well supported to go out and do what you need to do. And so while the academic is out the front, there's a huge support staff behind them and you don't get to achieve what you might achieve without serious supports. And so my whole career, I've been blessed with really good support. And again, you don't get to where I've gotten without having all that help and all that support, and I've always been grateful and thankful for it.

We’re already a pioneer and a leader. We're (Limerick) already a lighthouse city for Europe. We're already leading the European Network of Living Labs. We're already providing a model for not just Limerick, but Ireland and indeed the world. The question is, can we continue to do that? Can we make the project bigger and better, more ambitious? Can we be more impactful? And the answer to all of those questions is yes. Excellent.

Some final words of wisdom

This is the best job in the world. If you have the talent for it, you are not going to know if you have the talent for it unless you have a go at it. The way to have a go at it is to try to do a little bit of research as an undergraduate or try to get involved as a research assistant, try to do some citizen research, and then you'll see if you like it or not.

And if you do, you'll be very well supported and you'll have an awesome career. Okay, so you recommend it? Absolutely. It is the only job in the world that I could actually do. It's a fantastic job. There are very few jobs I think that would connect with perhaps my personality and my personality type. And I think if you're the kind of person that is a little restless, then research is certainly for you.

Curious about Stephen Kinsella's research