Yesterday’s outpouring was born of the frustration of watching, and listening carefully to, Professor Ian Young at the National Press Club yesterday.

In many ways he was very good, extremely articulate, but missed the point that our big eight universities, and all others, need to be able to see and understand the overarching economic picture.

They could ALL educate much better, be so much better funded and less reliant on “research”, if Australia’s economy wasn’t on FIRE.

Is the prof ignorant how FIRE steals from universities, or is he only too aware but believes he mustn’t refer to the hamstringing of Australia’s education by all our speculative activity and the taxing of the incomes of labour and capital?

Either way: it’s not good ….. hence my rant.

Common-sense is obsolete. Mounting evidence demonstrates modern education has made it so.

The humanities and sciences elevate us to such levels that no challenge is now beyond us, and the few who still rely on natural wit and innate skills to eke out a livelihood have to admit their ignorance is beginning to show. Their lack of qualifications attests to their redundancy, and they ought to submit themselves, if age permits, to getting a good tertiary education within the higher education system where they will be taught the futility of relying upon so-called common-sense. If they don’t have the wherewithal to do so, they may borrow.

What is common-sense, anyway? It is surely an abstraction, often an excuse for ignorance of society’s norms and mores. The trademark of ‘common-sense’ appears to be the quaint belief that if you don’t step on the toes of others you’ll get by in life, provided everybody else reciprocates against the same criterion. This rather charming idyll that life should somehow be ‘fair’ demonstrates the backwardness and gaucherie of these lost souls. Where exactly do they expect to find this ephemeral ‘fairness’ in today’s competitive world? One would hope by now everybody understands the world owes nobody a living – particularly people without a qualification.

Girding one’s loins in excellence and gaining advantage over others in preparation for the real world is, quite correctly, modern education’s raison détre. Universities must research and reinforce the status quo, these historic heights to which modern society has risen, if it is not to fragment and retrogress back to an ancient world of folklore and purported ‘common-sense’. If we are to progress, we must eschew mediocrity and hold to the standards we have set. Early in the twenty-first century, we may safely say common-sense ideas that have not been adopted to this point in time are obviously false ideas, and should be resisted.

Education has brought the world wealth aplenty–nobody goes without–and good governance is the hallmark of our times. An educated legislature, judiciary and cogent university research have all acted to deliver us to this, the acme of civilisation. We are blessed indeed – and modern education reinforces the fact.

Nevertheless, as this obviously well-educated, if slightly self-interested, group warns: we should beware of those who would demur by seeking change and instability!

Jessica Irvine http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/prime-minister-tony-abbott-must-act-now-to-reverse-australias-economic-demise/story-e6frflo9-1227006208538

Sure is, Jessica, but shoring up the atrocious GST should not play any part in essential revenue reform.  How’s about NO taxes on labour income, NOR capital income?  That certainly will work!

I hear you loud and clear on closing the tax breaks on ‘housing’!  How’s about on ALL land values, Jessica?

The rich want us to believe their wealth is good for us all – George Monbiot

In graphics, from The Conversation

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How can investors cope with a property bubble?

‘Black swan events‘ are said to be major unexpected socio-political happenings that come out of the blue – like a black swan.  A black swan?  Very rare (in some parts!)

Revolutions are sometimes put into this category, even though they are entirely explicable in terms of the wealth divide between the super-rich and everyone else having achieved intolerable proportions – a bit like we seem to be attaining right at the moment. Revolutions, usually caused by matters of taxation, are certainly never black swan events.

But, more importantly, nor is The Great Recession (US), now known in Australia as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), a black swan event, although many neo-classical economists would like to paint it that way in order to excuse themselves from their complicity (sometimes ignorance?) in banks around the world having been permitted to fund land price bubbles and get away with it.

It’s interesting that Australians are not only used to black swans—where they are native and found in great numbers (the equivalent Australian term might, in fact, be ‘a white swan event)’—but Australians such as myself and Steve Keen were amongst those in the forefront in calling this ‘black swan’, this GFC, years before we spoke about it (in “Lifting the Lid on the GFC“) at the Melbourne Town Hall in 2009, along with Michael Hudson.

Sure, Steve Keen has been criticised for getting his timing ‘wrong’ for the collapse of Australia’s real estate bubble–who could have foreseen the massive public expenditure the Rudd government would use to keep it happening?–but that is not to deny that Steve foresaw and spoke about upcoming inevitably bad outcomes from extant credit bubbles.

I looked at the impending collapse rather from the point of what all this credit had been permitted to fund.

So, let’s not hear analysts use the “black swan” metaphor for the current economic crisis. Like almost every recession or depression, it followed hot on the heels of yet another unsustainable bubble in land prices.

Aussies, quite used to black swans, forewarned the world we were running government-sanctioned Ponzi schemes.  We still are in Australia, and it must end badly for us, too.

Well exposed, Gavin Putland!
The system under which we labour is so stupid, you’ve just got to laugh, with disbelief.