I sometimes wonder what our economic system looks like from the perspective of eternity.

The packet gets smaller. The price goes up. The ingredients get cheaper. Somewhere, a board congratulates itself on improving margins. And for what?

So that someone who is already a millionaire can become a multi-millionaire.

We have built an entire system around the pursuit of more. More profit. More growth. More executive pay. And when there isn’t enough to go around, everyone else gets a little less.

Step back far enough and it becomes almost comical.

We are temporary creatures on a tiny planet, scrambling over percentages on spreadsheets as though they are the most important things in the world. A person can have more money than they could spend in several lifetimes and still ask how they can squeeze another few cents from the customer.

Perhaps that is the real absurdity. We have forgotten the difference between enough and more.

From that distance, the great scramble for more can look remarkably small, almost childish.

Alan T Kelly, Straffan, Co Kildare

Donogh O’Malley’s introduction of free secondary education 60 years ago — announced, famously, before he had secured cabinet approval to pay for it — was more than an education reform; it was an act of economic and social liberation.

Ireland’s subsequent prosperity demonstrates the extraordinary compound interest of educating a population. A child given opportunity in one generation can become the teacher, engineer, nurse, entrepreneur or parent who enlarges the opportunities of the next.

The lesson is worth remembering, as reading and mathematics scores now give cause for concern and artificial intelligence begins to alter the very meaning of knowledge.

Ireland’s next competitive advantage will not come from having more technology in classrooms. It will come from having better-educated young people who know how to use technology without being intellectually dependent on it.

Within a generation, the countries that prosper most from AI will be those that treat human education as more important, not less important, because of AI.

Sixty years ago, Ireland made secondary education universal. Perhaps the next great achievement should be to make deep thinking universal.

Enda Cullen, Armagh