hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Australia: falling behind in terms of non-economic prosperity?
"Australia ranks 20th out of 27 nations for infant mortality and indigenous Australians rate second last.Youth road deaths are the third highest in the OECD and Australian children are 12 times more likely to live in a jobless household as those in Japan.
In education, Australia performs relatively well but ranks 17 out of 25 nations for the transition between education to employment.
Family relationships are not strong, according to the report."
::View Article::
This is a bit of a follow up post to 'Do Booming Economic Times = Social Success?' because it concerns the well-being of the next generation of Australians in terms other than the purely material or economic.
A big concern of this blog is Australia's perceived tendency to place materialism and economic growth at the forefront of life. Not because of a dogmatic ideological stance against capitalism, modernity or something reactionary like that, but because it is felt that as a nation we all too often take the necessary requirements simply of open-ended economic growth to be the necessary requirements of a prosperous society, and we frame social success purely in terms of material success when the economy, wealth and products are simply means to ends rather than ends in themselves.
God is dead, and we have replaced him as a social ideal with materialism, or something like that. And we are doing this at the expense of the environment, families, liveability, and social cohesion and community sentiment.
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