“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”

- John Kenneth Galbraith

So Australia has managed to ride through the GFC because our confidence levels have remained high:

CPI rose 0.5% in the December quarter 2009.

But if our confidence levels remain high we continue to spend:

…almost half of younger Australians saying they plan to make a big purchase in the March quarter.

But according to an equities expert:

…rising levels of household debt are the biggest problem facing Australian businesses over the long term.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

A tertiary education education

The New York Times has, as usual, excellent commentary on tertiary education:

Are They Students? Or ‘Customers’?

Do Teachers Need Education Degrees?

Is a Masters Degree the new Bachelors Degree?

Why do I get the feeling that the New York Times editorial staff is more qualified to run a country than most of our politicians…?

The toughest challenge of them all

It’s no surprise that we aren’t all happy. Catherine Deveny’s article in The Age last year explored our quest for happiness and our desire to discover what really matters in life. One of her contentions was that a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of money escaping from things in order to be happy. This is obviously not a new concept – Neitzsche was huffing and puffing about humanity’s two favourite escapist tools, alcohol and religion, over 150 years ago. Deveny, however, updated the list with some modern-day alternatives:

Maybe our kids won’t grow up needing to anaesthetise the grief of emotional trauma with destructive sex, substance abuse, overeating, problem gambling, compulsive shopping, status anxiety, violence or workaholism.

We do, to a large extent, assume that people are the masters of their own destiny. Escapism is, by its nature, a personal choice. We choose to escape; we can’t be compelled to escape. It follows then that people are assumed to have the maturity and robust frame of mind to deal with the shit that life throws at them.

However, some people don’t, and they engage in the ultimate act of escapism – suicide. Unfortunately, an established consensus in the media not to report suicides for fear of encouraging such behaviour keeps this problem out of the public sphere.

Stocktake!

My unhealthy habit of collecting interesting articles on the net sometimes gets out of control. So, I’m going to try my hand at public expurgation and publicise it in order to absolve myself of the shame of having 18 or so laptop windows open at once:

The nuclear issue – does it have a future in Australia?

Australians warm to nuclear power – Survey results
A call for a rational debate – The Age’s associate editor
A rational debate – Excellent piece from the founding member of an International Nuclear Energy body
Supply constraints on production of nuclear plant – Worldwide, there are only four or so facilities that can produce new generation nuclear plant cores
Talking to key stakeholders about the place of nuclear in Australia

3-1-8-4, we don’t want no botox…here.

I like Elwood. In the two weeks since I’ve been living in this beachside, village-esque, inner-city suburb, I have fallen in love with the place. My previous share house was in the genteel, part ‘old money’, part ‘mover-and-shaker’ suburb of Toorak. I never admitted to living there, though. When you’re a 24 year old student and you say you live in Toorak, people never look at you the same way again. I would generally only admit to living in South Yarra, or, at a stretch of the imagination, Burnley.

One never knows where loyalty is born

(Thanks Mad Men Season 1 Episode 12 for the title.)

One of The Age headlines today was the revelation that the suspected Al Qaeda operative who threatened to blow up a plane in the States last week attended an Australian university. It has emerged that 23-year old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied at the University of Woolongong’s Dubai campus for seven months earlier this year.

This revelation almost implies that Australia had, at some stage, a responsibility to detect that Abdulmutallab was a potential terrorist. In the wake of September 11 you would expect higher education institutions to put processes in place to attempt to identify anyone who might want to destroy Western civilisation in the name of religion.

I’m not suggesting a Brave New World-esque system whereby students are genetically or psychologically screened for a propensity to blow things up. But you have to wonder, could he have been stopped by anyone before he attempted to commit an act of terrorism?

A real education revolution

For those of you who have been kind enough to read my blog posts, you’ll remember that I wrote a little while ago about the increasing corporatisation and bureaucratisation of university life. The good news is that the article was picked up by some university administrators and I’ve been feeding into their consultation process for arts projects on campus. The bad news is I’ve opened up a can of worms and the more I delve into the labyrinth of higher education, the more I realise is wrong with it.

Blog fail!

I’m so sorry I haven’t posted in the past month. Only another week before exams are finished! The study is excruiciating and believe me, I’d much rather be musing and deliberating and opinionating on this page then what I’m actually doing right now. So please hang tight, I have plenty – PLENTY – of material coming. Stay tuned for discussion on nuclear power and arms deterrence, the return of big government in the 21st century, the disaster that is the Afghanistan war, and some philosophising on interesting ideas that have crossed my path in the past four weeks.

A little bit of vitriol with your Sunday evening

Here’s an article I wrote for the Monash University student newspaper Lot’s Wife, entitled ‘The State of the University’:

We’ve all encountered the maze that is the Monash University bureaucracy. It’s insidious and it permeates every aspect of being a student at university. Most decisions that have a significant impact on students and the student experience are made within a labyrinth of committees comprised of various university bureaucrats. However – and it is a common symptom of many organisations – once the directions from up high have permeated their way through layers of management and committee structures, the outcomes that result are often substantially different from the original intentions. Monash University does not necessarily practice what it preaches, and the gap between its rhetoric and its actions is often a gaping chasm.

Awareness-raising vs pragmatic change – the battle we don’t need to have

There was a point in late 2006-early 2007, just before Howard got kicked out, when all the stars of the climate change debate aligned and a perfect storm of publicity nudged climate change from the fringe into the mainstream. The constituents of that perfect storm were Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report and the UK Government’s Stern report. And thank god for that step change in awareness, because without it we wouldn’t have a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the works, or a 20% by 2020 renewable energy target, or the combined momentum of Australian business, government and community leaders pushing their constituents towards a sustainable mode of living and working.