Inheritance: the major life event no politician wants to mention

When I was growing up, my family didn’t have much. We lived rent-free in a succession of down-at-heel manses (the Salvos called them “quarters”), but my father’s stipend was a small one on which to support four kids.Mum worried about where my parents would live after they retired but, with much scrimping and saving (including making my sisters hand over almost all their wages), they built and paid off a small cottage at Lake...

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Economists need updating on what makes humans tick

At the heart of the weaknesses of economics – its frequently wrong predictions and the bad advice its high priests often give governments – is its primitive understanding – its “model” - of how and why humans behave the way they do.It’s taking economists far too long to realise that to understand how the economy works you’ve got to start by understanding how the people who make up the economy work. The model economists started...

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Now's a good time to work on your rules to live by

The week between Christmas and new year is unique among the 52, a week of no great consequence, a kind of no man’s land between the end of the old year and the start of the new. Not a gap year, but a gap week. A week where all the sensible people are on leave and having fun with the family, while the few who must work while others play hope there won’t actually be much work and no one will mind if they skive off early.But I’ve...

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Virus reminder: governments need to be better, not smaller

One good thing the coronavirus has done is slow the pace of our lives, leaving us more time to think about them. And since the main device being used to stop the spread of the virus has been to reduce physical contact between people, it hasn’t been hard to see that what matters most to us is face-to-face contact with family and friends. People of middle age fret about not being able to visit elderly parents. The great Dr Brendan...

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Getting and spending - what's it meant to prove?

In the Aussie calendar, tomorrow – the day after the Australia Day holiday – is the unofficial start to the working year. So today’s the last day we have a moment to pause and wonder what all our getting and spending – my usual subject matter – is meant to prove. From a narrow biological and evolutionary perspective, our only purpose is to survive and replicate our genes, playing our part in the survival of our species. Apart...

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What would Jesus do about tax and government spending?

It’s Easter, so let me ask you an odd question: have you noticed how arguments about governments’ intervention in the economy – should they, or shouldn’t they – often rely on an appeal to Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan? No, me neither. Until I read a little book called, The Political Samaritan: How Power Hijacked a Parable, by Nick Spencer, of the British religion-and-society think tank, Theos. This is my take on what...

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Here’s what you’ll have most regrets about

They say no one on their deathbed ever regrets not spending more time at the office. Which is not to say we don't have other regrets, nor that we have to wait until we're drawing our last breath to have them. This column will tell you nothing about the state of the economy, or business or the financial markets, but that's its attraction. Maybe there are other things you should be paying attention to, so as the cut the number...

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Have a touchy-feely holiday break from the economic grind

I hope your "face time" with family and friends over the holiday break wasn't done using a mobile phone. A phone call may be better than nothing, but it turns out that regular, in-the-flesh, face-to-face communication reduces the risk of depression in older adults. That's according to research by Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, and others. "Meeting friends and family face-to-face is strong...

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GITTINS the Book: Sneak preview I

I was an "OK" - an officers' kid. Both my father and my mother were officers (ministers) in the Salvation Army and, until I left home at 21, the Army and its strange way of life dominated mine. For 45 years my father was in charge of a succession of small corps, or churches, around Queensland and NSW. This meant our family moved every two years, sometimes every year. I ended up attending five primary schools and three high...

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Easter message to business is think relationships

At this time of year it's worth pondering: many business people and economists think of themselves as Christians, but what implications does this carry for the way they view the world and conduct their affairs? According to Michael Schluter, founder of Relationships Global and, these days, a business consultant, Christianity is a "relational" religion. If so, it doesn't sit easily with market capitalism as it is conceptualised...

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'Wealth creators' push materialism over social side

There is a contradiction at the heart of the way we organise our lives, the way governments regulate society and even the way the Bureau of Statistics decides what it needs to measure and what it doesn't. Ask people what's the most important thing in their lives and very few will answer making money and getting rich. Almost everyone will tell you it's their human relationships that matter most. And yet much of the time that's...

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How business is white-anting the weekend

Whether or not they realise what they're doing, Australia's business people, economists and politicians are in the process of dismantling the weekend and phasing out public holidays. And they're doing it in the name of making us better off. Historically, the two arrangements that have protected the weekend and public holidays from encroachment by employers are state government restrictions on trading hours and the requirement...

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Breakdown in relations is everyone's business

I get to meet a lot of famous and interesting people in my job, but few have had more influence on me than Dr Michael Schluter, the social thinker, social entrepreneur and founder of Britain's Relationships Foundation. They say genius is being the first to say the obvious. If so, Schluter is one. I'm sure Socrates or Aristotle beat him to it but, in our time, Schluter is the first to forcefully remind us of something we all...

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