GDP is going backwards. That doesn't mean your life is, too

By Millie Muroi, Economics Writer 

If gross domestic product – better known by its nickname GDP – were a perfect reflection of our quality of life, we would be in trouble.

It’s a rough measure of how much we produce, earn and spend, and it grew a measly 0.1 per cent in the first three months of this year. If our population hadn’t boomed at the same time, Australia would be in recession. In fact, in per-person terms, we’ve actually been going backwards for an entire year.

GDP is a go-to gauge for politicians, pundits and journalists when it comes to our standard of living. Generally, if it’s growing, that’s a good thing. It means we’re producing more, making more money and getting to consume more: all signs of a happy, healthy economy, right? Not necessarily.

GDP reflects the monetary gains from economic activity. But it’s basically blind to any destruction we might cause to the natural environment as we pursue profits and make purchases. And it tells us nothing about how those monetary gains – or income – are shared among the rich and poor.

It also fails to account for all the other things that make life worth living: safety, a sense of belonging and how healthy (not just wealthy) we are, to name a few.

While it’s important to keep an eye on traditional economic indicators, they don’t give us a well-rounded picture of many of the things that matter. Metrics such as GDP, unemployment and inflation can help the Reserve Bank and government make informed choices when steering the economy.

But relying on these indicators alone is like driving down a highway with broken mirrors and shattered headlights. You might be able to see some things, but you’ll miss (and hit) a lot – with some pretty big consequences.

It’s part of the reason the Labor government has been copping heat this week after it decided not to add questions on topics such as sexuality in the 2026 census. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said it was to avoid “divisive” community debate, but many members of the LGBTQ community understandably felt they were being overlooked.

Without solid data, it’s difficult to make policy decisions, particularly for groups that are vulnerable and facing particular challenges. This was a chance to fill one of those gaps.

But the Coalition has no clean record either when it comes to data collection. Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor has said the government needs to zone in on lower inflation and lower interest rates. Fine. Except that he wants to scrap the government’s “Measuring What Matters” framework to do so.

But the Measuring What Matters framework … matters. It tracks our progress towards a more healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive and prosperous Australia. That may sound fluffy and abstract. But those five adjectives frame 50 key indicators that make up the wellbeing dashboard, covering everything from air quality to how secure we feel and how healthy we are. It’s a toolkit we can use to fix at least some of the broken mirrors and headlights on our car and develop a more holistic view of our economy.

While it’s important to keep an eye on traditional economic indicators, they don’t give us a well-rounded picture of many of the things that matter.

It’s all about getting the economy to work for people and the planet rather than the other way around.

Dr Cressida Gaukroger, wellbeing government initiative lead at the Centre for Policy Development, says the data doesn’t often swing massively (perhaps one reason why the wellbeing report was largely glossed over by the media last week).

But it’s important because it gets us thinking about the long term, specifically “the changes we should be making now and the investments that we should be making now,” Gaukroger says. This way, we can save ourselves from longer-term problems that might otherwise be ignored in the frenzy around the latest GDP number, for example.

“Without that kind of long-term vision of what we should be aiming for, it makes it very difficult when we’re stuck with short-term election cycles and politicisation of government spending,” Gaukroger says.

So, what did the latest update on this data tell us? Let’s look at the bad news first.

Female health-adjusted life expectancy has dropped. Normally, Gaukroger says, we don’t see much movement in the average number of years a person can expect to live in “full health”. But chronic health conditions are crippling more people. About half of Australians lived with a chronic health condition in 2022 – up from 47 per cent in 2018 and 42 per cent in 2002, with women more likely to be grappling with one.

When it came to the environment, biological diversity worsened. From 1985 to 2020, the abundance of threatened and near-threatened species plummeted by roughly 60 per cent. Biodiversity is important because it ensures balanced and functioning ecosystems.

Some measures of cohesiveness have also deteriorated. In 2023, our sense of belonging fell to a value of 78 – the lowest it has been since 2007, when the measure was benchmarked at a score of 100.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Other measures have improved, highlighting the areas we are thriving in.

We’re feeling safer walking through our neighbourhoods at night, and more than three-quarters of people in 2023 agreed with the statement that “accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger” – up from 63 per cent in 2018.

Gaukroger says another positive development is the decline in “material footprint” per person, meaning fewer raw materials such as fossil fuels and minerals are being extracted to satisfy our demand. While the amount of raw materials being used to fulfil our wants and needs was 37.6 tonnes a person in 2010, the amount fell to 31 tonnes in 2023.

That means we’re working towards a circular economy, which reduces waste by, for example, sharing, reusing, repairing, and recycling things and designing materials that are less resource-intensive to make in the first place. This is a win for the environment.

The Measuring What Matters dashboard is not perfect. As Treasurer Jim Chalmers admitted last week, some of the data is too old, and there are still holes that need to be patched up. But it’s still well worth the investment.

Focusing too heavily on one thing comes at a cost. If we want a well-rounded gauge of our wellbeing and effective policy to drive us to our desired destination, we need to look beyond GDP.

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Robodebt: Politicians behaving badly to win our approval

Cliches become cliches because so many people see how aptly they capture a situation. My rarely achieved goal is to initiate them rather than reuse them. But at least let me be the first to see how aptly one applies to the robo-debt scandal, by paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: we get the politicians we deserve.

You may not know it, but there once was a time when the convention – rigorously policed by Yes, Minister-style bureaucrats – was that incoming governments did not inquire into the doings of their predecessors.

But that convention was breached a long time ago, and now it’s conventional for every newly elected government to immediately initiate formal inquiries into the misdeeds – actual or supposed – of the government the voters have just thrown out.

It’s become another of the many advantages of incumbency. You improve your chances of a prolonged period in power by discrediting your traditional opponent in the eyes of the electors.

The first such inquiry I remember was the Costigan royal commission into the notorious activities of the Ship Painters and Dockers Union, called by Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government in 1980, in the hope of embarrassing Labor.

The Howard government established another anti-union royal commission, into the building construction industry, and the Abbott government set up royal commissions into the Rudd government’s ill-fated “pink batts” home insulation program, and into trade union governance and corruption, hoping to embarrass the then Labor leader, Bill Shorten. So it may not be a simple coincidence that Shorten was the minister who commissioned the robo-debt inquiry.

I was once a supporter of the no-looking-back convention, but now I see that the decline in standards of political behaviour require governments to be held more strictly to account – if only in retrospect. When you think about it, the old gentlemanly convention – that dog doesn’t eat dog – arose from the two political sides colluding to make their lives easier at the expense of the public’s knowledge of what they’ve been up to.

So, it’s a good thing that this royal commission has shone a bright light on robo-debt as “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal” that made many people on the dole and other benefits “feel like criminals”.

“In essence, people were traumatised on the off-chance they might owe money,” the commissioner concluded.

The Liberal ministers who initiated and had oversight of this horrendous scheme should face the music, and those ministers who allowed it to run on for years despite its iniquities being well known (I wrote about them in early 2017) should be ashamed.

But while we’re all pointing accusatory fingers at the former government, I don’t think the rest of us should get too high on our high horse. Most of us don’t come out of this episode with clean hands.

The truth is, most of us knew – or certainly could have known – what was going on, but weren’t too bothered by it. We didn’t inquire further.

When the opportunity arose to disgrace its political opponents, the Albanese government knew where the bodies had been buried but, at the time, the Labor opposition didn’t make a great fuss about robo-debt.

Media outlets love boasting about the royal commissions their investigations have forced on reluctant governments but, with an honourable exception or two, they can claim little credit for this one. This one’s a win for the #notmydebt victims using social media.

People are right to see the former government as being utterly, shockingly lacking in compassion in its treatment of people falsely accused of owing the government money. For such a measure to be initiated by someone proud to proclaim his Christian faith is truly shocking.

But it’s wrong to see these people just as ruthless debt collectors, determined to cut government spending by fair means or foul. Scott Morrison wanted to be seen as the tough welfare cop.

The government wanted to be seen getting rough and tough with dole bludgers because it knew many voters would find it gratifying.

Labor knows it, too. That’s why it wasn’t making much fuss at the time. And why, in the May budget, it rejected expert advice that it greatly increase the rate of the JobSeeker payment to stop it being well below the poverty line.

Both sides of politics know there’s much “downward envy” among Australians. Hard-working, tax-paying people who greatly resent those people – mainly youngsters – who prefer sitting around at home rather than getting out and finding a job, but still have the government giving them money.

There are many reasons I’m proud to be an Australian. But one thing that makes me ashamed is the way our politicians seek popularity by pandering to the worst side of the Australian character: our tendency to scapegoat those less fortunate than ourselves, particularly boat people and the jobless.

Like Joe Hockey, we see ourselves as “lifters”, and greatly despise those we regard as “leaners”.

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Prep for the new year: what I've learnt about happiness

Let me wish you a happy new year. And not just a happy New Year’s Eve, a whole year of happiness. But the thing about happiness is to be sure you know what you’re wishing for. It’s something that’s surprisingly easy to get wrong.

Normal economic journalists don’t waste time thinking about such a touchy-feely topic, but I went astray. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about it. Even wrote a book about it.

I blame Bob Hawke, who once hit the headlines for saying that economics was about happiness. Though many economists today may deny it, he was right. He meant that economics was about helping people maximise their “utility” – the satisfaction they derive from their consumption.

“Happiness” is a word used by ordinary people, so journalists use it freely. Although some economists study it, most would never use such a frivolous word. “Welfare” is the closest they come. They’ve stopped talking about “utility” because they can’t measure it.

It’s psychologists who take most interest in happiness, but even they prefer to call it “subjective wellbeing”. Sounds more scientific.

A recent article from the British Psychological Society says that “people who are happy – who enjoy ‘hedonistic wellbeing’ - experience plenty of positive emotions and are generally pretty satisfied with life”.

But that’s just a psychologist’s way of saying that happy people have been shown to be ... happy. It doesn’t tell you how to become happy – nor whether happiness is what we should be shooting for.

The article does go on to quote the finding of a review of many studies that, while some strategies recommended for boosting happiness – such as taking time in the day to reflect on what you are grateful for – are far from bad in themselves, if you expect them to make you feel noticeably happier, you’re likely to be disappointed.

The social commentator Hugh Mackay – a man from whom I’ve learnt much – is very critical of the modern preoccupation with happiness. It’s that word “hedonistic” that offends him. It implies that it’s OK to make the pursuit of pleasure our primary goal. Seek out positive emotions and avoid negative emotions as much as possible.

As usual, he’s right. A life of pleasure seeking and avoiding all pain is unlikely to be satisfying. Pain and sadness are part of the human condition, and without our measure of them we aren’t fully human. It’s inhuman not to feel sad over the death of someone we love or the breakup of a relationship.

We’ve evolved to feel pain as well as pleasure, negative as well as positive emotions, for good reason. Pain, for instance, can be a signal to keep our fingers away from hot stoves, or to go to the doctor’s.

The sadness we feel over our own misfortunes should leave us with empathy towards the misfortunes of others, that we should renew our efforts to live up to the Golden Rule.

The British article offers a better kind of happiness: what Socrates called “eudaimonia” – the feeling that your life has meaning, and that you are reaching your potential.

It quotes a study finding that people who felt more strongly that the things they did in their lives were more worthwhile – in other words, that their life had meaning – were better off in all kinds of ways: socially, physically and emotionally.

So, how do we add meaning to our lives? One way could be through our jobs – paid or unpaid. The goal of helping to make the world a better place is easier seen in some jobs than others. But I remember reading of a hospital cleaner who saw her job as vital to speeding the recovery of the patient and the convenience of their visiting families.

The more fundamental way to add meaning is via our relationships with family, friends and workmates. We are, first and foremost, social animals.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says “social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness – much more so than money. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with people in those networks”.

The other thing I’ve learnt is not to be misled by the US constitution and think you can pursue happiness. The founding fathers meant people should be free to run their lives as they see fit. True. But it’s a mistake to have being happy as your primary goal – and even worse to think you can make yourself happy by treating yourself to all the things you enjoy doing (chocolate, for instance).

People who keep asking themselves “am I happy?” or “what can I do to make myself happy?” aren’t happy – and probably never will be. Happy people rarely think about being happy.

Happiness pursuers have got it the wrong way round. Happiness is a side effect of being too busy leading a fulfilling life to think about it.

The way to be happy is to forget your own happiness and concentrate on making other people happy.

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How would Jesus treat people on the dole?

Since it’s Easter, let me tell you about something that’s long puzzled me: how can an out-and-proud Pentecostalist such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison be leading the most un-Christian government I can remember? Fortunately, however, the virus crisis seems to be bringing out his more caring side.

Many people think being a Christian means being obsessed with sexual matters - abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriage – plus, these days, their human right to discriminate against people who don’t share their sexual taboos.

But if you read the four gospels recording what Jesus did and said, one message you get is one rarely emphasised by his modern-day, generally better-off followers. Jesus was always on about the plight of the poor, and was surprisingly tough on the rich.

Jesus gave his followers a new commandment, that they love one another. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” Asked who was the neighbour we should love as our self, he told the parable of a despised Samaritan, who rescued a man bleeding in a ditch while two upright church-goers “passed by on the other side”.

Jesus said he came to “proclaim the good news to the poor”. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. . . But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.”

To the rich he advised: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed.”

Jesus blessed those who had been kind to others: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

When a young man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, he said: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” But the young man “was shocked, and went away grieving, for he had many possessions”.

All this compares badly with the actions of the Coalition government, in which Morrison has always played a senior role. As minister for immigration, he was more ruthless than Labor in turning away strangers who came by boat seeking asylum. Those who did make it were treated harshly, to ensure any further strangers got the message about how unwelcome they’d be.

A lot of people like to divide the poor between the deserving and the undeserving. Like Labor before it, the Coalition has pandered to this un-Christian attitude. It favours “lifters” over “leaners”. Morrison himself introduced the ethical code that only those judged to have “had a go” will “get a go”.

The deserving poor are people on the age pension; the undeserving are the unemployed, single parents and probably most of those claiming the disability support pension. I went out and found a job; what’s stopping them doing the same except their own laziness?

Labor always pandered to the widespread “downward envy” of the jobless, but the Coalition has doubled down, reintroducing work for the dole despite all the reports saying it does nothing to improve people’s employability, making people run down their savings and wait longer to be eligible for the dole, making people prove they’ve approached an unreasonable number of employers each fortnight and suspending their payment if they fail, or miss an appointment for any reason. Not to mention the "robo-debt" scandal.

The Coalition wants to control how people spend the dole by paying them by card rather than cash. It wants regular drug testing of those on the dole. And it has steadfastly resisted widespread public pressure to increase the paltry amount of the dole, even though Labor has finally been shamed into abandoning its own longstanding hardheartedness.

But now, however, having adopted the slogan “we’re all in this together” – one beloved of my co-religionists in the Salvos - in his battle against the virus, Morrison seems to have had a change of heart. Whereas Kevin Rudd studiously avoided including the unemployed in his two cash splashes, Morrison has included them with other welfare recipients in his two $750 payments.

His temporary “coronavirus supplement” effectively doubles the rate of unemployment benefits to about $550 a week. He must know that returning the dole to $40 a day after six months won’t be politically possible. Meanwhile, his temporary JobKeeper payment of a flat $750 a week undercompensates higher wage earners while overcompensating lower wage earners, including many casuals.

In all, a Christlike turn for the good.

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Morrison’s hang-ups make him a bad economic manager

Scott Morrison’s problem is that he gets politics – and is good at it – but doesn’t get economics.

The Prime Minister doesn’t get that if he keeps playing politics while doing nothing to stop the economy sliding into recession, nothing will save him from the voters’ wrath.

Neither he nor Josh Frydenberg seem to get that if we endure another year of very weak growth before they pop up next September boasting about their fabulous budget surplus, no one will be cheering.

How could a second financial year of weak growth possibly leave the budget with a big surplus? Because of the miracle of continuing bracket creep and iron ore prices kept high by BHP’s dam disaster in Brazil.

If there was any doubt about the likelihood of continuing weakness in our economy – independent of any adverse shock from abroad – it was swept away last week. The International Monetary Fund forecast real growth in Australia's gross domestic product of just 1.7 per cent this calendar year, improving only to 2.3 per cent next year.

So the IMF isn’t buying even Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe’s “gentle turning point”, much less the efforts of Treasury’s seemingly unsackable Italian forecaster, Dr Rosie Scenario.

Frydenberg’s response has been that giving top priority to achieving a budget surplus isn’t just “a vanity exercise” because “a strong budget position helps build the resilience of the economy for external shocks, whenever that may occur, and your ability to respond to those stocks with a fiscal response”.

Translation: we can’t afford to spend money staving off recession because we’ll need to spend that money once we are in recession. The absurdity of this argument that a stitch in time doesn’t save nine has been hidden by his unstated assumption that, since the domestic economy's going fine, it’s only some shock from abroad that could lay us low.

Remember all the hand-wringing about quarter after quarter of weak growth in real wages, made even weaker – as Lowe has reminded us – by exceptionally strong growth in income tax collections? It’s imaginary, apparently.

Weak consumer spending, weak growth in business investment spending, contracting home-building? More imagining.

Oh yes, employment’s still growing surprisingly strongly. “See, I told you everything’s fine.” These guys are in denial.

Frydenberg’s argument about the need to “reload the fiscal canon” ready for the next downturn makes perfect sense - provided you’re paying back public debt at a time when the economy’s growing strongly and, if anything, could use a bit of slowing to ensure inflation doesn’t get away.

That's not us, unfortunately.

The IMF says “monetary policy [changing interest rates] cannot be the only game in town. It should be coupled with fiscal [budgetary] support where fiscal space is available, and policy is not already too expansionary”.

Far from being too expansionary, our fiscal policy is contractionary (which is why the budget balance is improving even as the economy slows).

And throughout the time that both sides of politics have been so worried about “debt and deficit”, the IMF has kept telling us not to worry because we have loads of “fiscal space” – that is, our level of public debt is way below the point where we should become concerned.

My bet is Morrison and Frydenberg will eventually panic and take stimulatory measures (probably a lot of them), but they’ll come too late in the piece to stop confidence unravelling, with punters tightening their belts as businesses lay off staff.

But not yet. Frydenberg has let it be known the government will try to boost business investment by introducing a special investment allowance – but not until the budget next May.

Even so, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has let it be known that they’re thinking about turning the December midyear budget update into a mini budget if it soon becomes apparent the present tax and interest-rate cuts haven’t made much difference.

But even when that bullet is bitten, Morrison’s effectiveness as an economic manager will still be inhibited by his various political hang-ups. For instance, neither he nor his Treasurer can bring themselves even to utter the offensive S-word – stimulus.

And his determination never to be seen helping the poor (whom those in the party’s base know to be utterly undeserving) stops him taking two stimulatory measures that are simple, quick-acting and highly effective, while yielding lasting benefits.

The first is simply increasing the Newstart allowance.

The other is a proposal worked up by Dr Peter Davidson for the Australian Council of Social Service for the feds to invest $7 billion over three years building 20,000 social housing dwellings. This would not only boost growth and jobs in the becalmed housing industry, but also reduce homelessness.

Sorry, makes too much sense.

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Decades of economic success have come at high social cost

I’m thinking of starting a new social movement. Still working on the details, but I’ve already decided we’ll have lapel buttons, bumper stickers and, of course, a hashtag, all that say #letscalmdown.

I know I’m supposed to be banging on about the urgent need for economic reform but, although as a nation we’re better off materially than ever before, I doubt we’re the happiest, most contented or most fulfilled we’ve ever been.

Even if it’s true we all want to be richer (which I doubt), why do we have to be in such a tearing hurry about it?

While I was calming down on holidays a few weeks back, I read social researcher Hugh Mackay’s latest book, Australia Reimagined, and it occurred to me that we seem to be paying quite a price for our economic success.

Mackay says that two seminal facts about Australia suggest we are in urgent need of some course correction.

First, thanks to our rate of relationship breakdown, our shrinking households, our busy lives, our increasing income inequality and our ever-increasing reliance on information technology (and, he could have added, our greater division between public and private schooling), we are a more fragmented society than we have ever been.

Social fragmentation is the opposite of social cohesion. Our fragmentation has been exacerbated by rampant individualism and competitive materialism, whereas social cohesion is grounded in compassion and mutual respect and is the key to true greatness for any society.

“In countries like Australia, we are at more risk of antisocial behaviour from people who are socially isolated and mentally ill than we are from ideologically based acts of terrorism," he says.

Second, we are in the grip of what he insists is “an epidemic of anxiety”. “Two million of us suffer an anxiety disorder in any one year and the closely related epidemics of depression and obesity swell that number even more."

Up to a third of us will experience mental health problems in our lifetime, 20 per cent of young Australians will have had at least one episode of clinical depression before the age of 25 and two-thirds of us are overweight or obese.

These two facts are so closely linked, Mackay says, we should think of them as two sides of the same coin. “Heads we’re more fragmented; tails we’re more anxious.”

The link is that, because we’re herd animals by nature, we become anxious when we’re cut off from the herd and our anxiety, in turn, induces the kind of self-absorption that further inhibits social interaction, creating a vicious circle.

Many of us have retreated into self-absorption – a heightened sense of personal entitlement and an exaggerated concern with personal comfort and personal appearance – as part of our disengagement from political and social issues and desire to escape into our own comfort zone, both physical and digital. The echo chamber effect of social media is part of this escape.

Mackay admits there’s nothing new about people feeling anxious, but argues there’s a lot more of it today because we’ve been neglecting the four strategies we've long used to minimise it: the magical power of faith, the secret power of community, the restorative power of nature and the therapeutic power of creative self-expression.

Let’s look at faith and community. Research by the leading American psychologist Martin Seligman led him to conclude that faith in something larger than the self is the one absolutely essential prerequisite for a sense of meaning in life. And the larger the entity, the more meaning people derive from it.

For most of human history – and for most people living on the planet today – the God of religion has supplied that something greater. But in our ungodly era, “the vacuum created by the absence of religion must be filled by something else”, Mackay says. He’s right. Our psychological makeup demands it.

Most of the research showing the health benefits of religious faith and practice is actually identifying two influential factors: not just the faith, but also the “fellowship”. Church or mosque goers are members of a community of like-minded people who, at their best, are characterised by mutual support, kindness and respect.

The less obvious benefit of social engagement is that “belonging to a community keeps us in touch with people who might need us, and nothing relieves anxiety like a focus on someone else’s needs”. It is “the exercise of compassion – not merely the experience of belonging – that is the great antidote to anxiety”.

Don’t have enough time to do all that, you say? Don’t want to turn your life upside down? Mackay says we’re not going to turn the clock back, not going to junk the technology, not going to stop enjoying the fleeting pleasures of consumerism and not going to give up pursuit of material prosperity for a life of poverty in a monastic cell.

“But is easing back a possibility? Rethinking our priorities, slowing down, disconnecting from technology sometimes (such as when we’re eating a meal in the company of family or friends, or heading for bed), noticing what is happening to our children as a result of the toxic blend of their excessive screen time and our excessive busyness ... in other words, being a little more observant, a little more moderate, a little more restrained, a little better prepared for the future”, Mackay suggests.

Sounds good to me.

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Latest attack on welfare 'unworthies' is contemptible

Remember the Turnbull government's plans to drug test people on the dole? While you and I are diverted by all the political game-playing in this week's last session of parliament for the year, the government is hoping to slip these and other mean-spirited cuts in social security through the Senate – probably after some deal with the Xenophon-less Xenophones.

You can blame it on my Salvo upbringing – whose influence on my values seems to get stronger the older I become – but I have nothing but contempt for comfortably-off people who try to solve their problems by picking on the down-and-out.

If Australians can't do better than that, what hope is there for us?

The expected savings (which may or may not eventuate) of $478 million over four years are minor in a budget of almost $2 trillion over the same period.

But they'll be coming out of the hides of those most in need, those whose first lack of moral discipline was failing to pick the right parents, those whose luck has been worse than ours, those who've failed to deny themselves and their children the slightest treat at any time, the way we undoubtedly would had we been in their shoes.

They're the cuts a government makes when it wants to be seen to be acting to reduce the budget deficit, but lacks the courage to take on a fight with the medical specialists, drug companies, chemists, mining companies or other powerful interest groups guarding their own, much bigger slice of budget pie.

They're also the cuts you make when you're indulging your well-off supporters' delusion that the "unsustainable" growth in welfare spending is caused by all the cheating by the undeserving poor, not the retirement of the Baby Boomers and their success in getting around the age pension means test.

To be fair, what the Coalition plans is just a step up from the harsh measures imposed by their Labor predecessors. Labor's conscience has returned only now it's back in opposition.

Labor, however, tried harder to disguise its true motive of gratifying the workers' self-righteous envy of those living the cushy life on the dole or sole parent pension.

Labor governments profess to be into tough love. Using carrots and sticks to encourage people of working age off benefits and into a job, which will bring them more money and self-respect.

But I see little of that cant from the present supposed protectors of the disadvantaged, Alan Tudge and his problematically named boss, Christian Porter.

They seem all toughness and no love. They want to be seen as the great punishers and straighteners of the hordes of lazy cheats and bludgers and ne'er-do-wells sucking the blood of all the over-taxed, hard-working upper income-earners whose self-serving interests they were elected to promote.

Consider the plan to drug test people on the dole. It seems an exercise in emotionally gratifying punishment in search of an "evidence base".

According to the Rural Doctors Association, "people who are looking for a job do not generally have any higher incidence of drug use than those in the general population".

In 2013, the government's own Australian National Council on Drugs examined the idea and recommended against it, saying "there is no evidence that drug testing welfare beneficiaries will have any positive effects for those individuals or for society, and some evidence indicating such a practice could have high social and economic costs".

Almost all the doctors and other professionals actually involved in helping drug addicts have opposed the idea. They're particularly insistent that compelling people to undergo treatment doesn't work.

They won't be testing everyone on the dole, however, that would be far too expensive. Just 5000 people. But the amount the government expects to save by denying payments to those who fail the test suggests it doesn't expect the move to have any great deterrence effect. It's just an excuse to cut people off the dole and save money.

Other pettifogging measures in the bills the government hopes to get through this week include freezing benefit rates to wives and widowed pensioners until they're no greater than the "jobseeker payment" (the latest bureaucratic euphemism for the dole), getting rid of the 14-week bereavement allowance, tightening the job search requirement for those aged 55 to 59 (who, as we all know, could find jobs if they tried) and making it easier to suspend their dole, and delaying the start of payments for some welfare recipients.

Another much-needed reform is delaying the start of dole payments until any savings people have are exhausted (then wondering why they can't pay unexpected bills on the single dole of $268 a week).

Other changes would make it easier for Centrelink to "breach" (cut payments to) people judged to have failed to comply with their "mutual obligations". There's more, but you get the idea.

I'm just waiting for the bill that sools Centrelink's robodebt recovery machine on those cabinet ministers and others who breached the Constitution by claiming to be eligible for election when they weren't, but have received months of pay to which they weren't entitled.

Apparently, the rules applying to little guys whose behaviour is less than perfect are a lot tougher than those applying to top guys deciding how tough to be on the little guys. You get the tough, we get the love.

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We're Closing the Gap, but far too slowly

The latest report on government spending on Indigenous people makes shocking reading. So let me explain it to you before some One Nation-type gives you her version.

The report estimates that federal and state spending on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians was more than $33 billion in 2015-16, a real increase of almost 24 per cent since 2008-09.

That amounts to spending $44,900 a year per Indigenous Australian, twice the equivalent spending per person on the rest of the Aussie population.

See? Proof positive of what many radio shock jocks and One Nation supporters have always said: Aborigines get a host of government benefits the rest of us aren't entitled too.

After the nation's vow to Close the Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians on health, education and employment, it's hardly surprising Indigenous spending has grown.

Trouble is, there's little likelihood this apparently massive spending will see the Closing the Gap targets reached.

Bad, eh? Waste on a grand scale.

Fortunately, however, all is not as it seems. As associate professor Nicholas Biddle, a fellow of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, at the Australian National University, has explained in an article on my second-favourite website, The Conversation, a closer look at the figures shows there's no reason to swallow the rubbish peddled by the downward-envy brigade. ("Oh, Aborigines get it so much easier than we do.")

First point is that the $44,900 in annual spending per Indigenous person covers more than 150 spending categories, including social security payments, but also government spending on health, all levels of education, law and order, housing, community welfare, transport and even a share of the cost of the public service and defence.

So most comes in the form of services provided, rather than cash in hand. A bit over half of the spending comes from state and territory governments, leaving a bit less than half from the feds.

The report divides the $44,900 into "mainstream services" – services available to all Australians regardless of ethnic origin – and "Indigenous-specific services".

The latter account for just 18 per cent of the total – about $8000 a year per person. This proportion is down on earlier years.

But this still leaves the annual cost per person of mainstream services for Indigenous Australians exceeding the equivalent cost for other Australians by about $14,500. How's this explained?

Mainly by the greater intensity of Indigenous people's use of mainstream services. For instance, their rate of unemployment is higher. And, rightly or wrongly, a disproportionate share of law and order spending is devoted to Indigenous people.

As well, the Indigenous population is, on average, younger – meaning disproportionate spending on education.

The rest of the difference between the levels of spending on mainstream services is explained by the higher cost of providing those services in remote locations. Biddle says that 22 per cent of Indigenous Australians live in remote and very remote areas.

And remember this. While real spending on Indigenous Australians seems to be rising rapidly in absolute terms, so too is the Indigenous population. It's up by almost 16 per cent over the seven years to June 2016, compared with a little more than 11 per cent for the non-Indigenous population.

Biddle calculates that while real Indigenous spending per person has risen by 6.9 per cent over the seven years, real gross domestic product per person has risen by 7.5 per cent.

Sadly, it's true that the Closing the Gap targets set by the Council of Australian Governments in 2009 look unlikely to be achieved.

That's because progress to date has been so modest. The targets were worthy, but unrealistic. At this stage it's probable that setting revised, more achievable targets would do more to motivate governments to keep trying.

But this isn't to say we're making no progress. Biddle and a colleague at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Francis Markham, have been examining last year's census for evidence on how we're going with the gap.

On employment they find no noticeable improvement since the previous census in 2011. On education, however, the news is more encouraging.

"Indigenous people are getting into the education system earlier and staying for longer," they say. "This is likely to lead to improved socio-economic outcomes in future."

The proportion of three to five-year-olds attending preschool is up from 43.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent. The proportion of 15 to 18-year-olds at high school is up substantially from 51.2 per cent to 59.7 per cent.

The proportion of Indigenous people who've completed year 12 has risen from 28 per cent to 34.6 per cent. And the proportion of 15 to 24-year-olds in tertiary education is up from 14.1 per cent to 16.2 per cent.

But let's get real in another sense. Checking the figures to see what's been happening to government spending on Indigenous people is fine, but it tells us nothing about whether that spending is efficient, effective or even adequate.

What's more, looking at how we've been going on the various indicators of progress during the same period tells us little about whether that money is being spent well or badly.

Why? Many reasons. Because spending in one year may take many years to have an effect. Because spending in one area can affect multiple outcomes. Because outcomes in one area can be influenced by spending in many areas.

We know we're spending more but not achieving the improvement we'd hoped for. What we don't know is whether we're wasting our money or need to be spending a lot more.

Why not? Because we know too little about the effectiveness of particular spending programs. We haven't done nearly enough research to see what works and what doesn't.

We won't get as far as we should in Closing the Gap until we do our homework. That includes making more data held by government departments available to researchers.

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It's business that has the greatest sense of entitlement

How the worm – and the world – turns. When the Abbott government came to power just four years ago, it claimed its arrival signalled the "end of the age of entitlement". Don't laugh, it's happening – but in the opposite way to what treasurer Joe Hockey had in mind.

As Hockey saw it, the sense of entitlement we'd acquired, but which could no long be afforded, applied to the social needs of individuals and families.

We saw the results of this attitude in Tony Abbott and Hockey's first budget of 2014, which got an enormous thumbs-down from the public and the Senate, so that pretty much all that remains of the attack on unwarranted entitlement is the unending crusade by the government's Don Quixote, Christian Porter, and his loyal Sancho, Alan Tudge, to root out the last welfare cheat.

Not content with the grand stuff-up that was the "robodebt" use of unguided computers to collect amounts that may or may not have been overpaid, the pair are now hot on the trail of drug-taking welfare recipients.

Drug testing isn't cheap, so it's likely the exercise will cost the taxpayer more than it saves. And drug care experts – who weren't consulted - say addicts can't be successfully coerced into treatment.

Trouble is, successive governments have been cracking down on the crackdown on welfare cheats every year for decades, so there can't be all that many of 'em left.

Why do I get the feeling that cracking down on welfare cheating is, at best, what governments do when they want to be seen to be cutting their spending but aren't game to.

Or, at worst, when they want to exploit the popular delusion that we could all be paying less tax if it weren't for the massive sums being siphoned off by dole bludgers and the like.

Sorry, the people doing by far the most to keep welfare spending high and rising are known as age pensioners. And no one has a stronger sense of entitlement than an oldie fighting for the pension. "I've paid taxes all my life . . ."

But though one of Aussies' less attractive traits has been our proneness to "downwards envy" – the delusion that people worse-off than us are doing it easy – polling by the Essential organisation suggests it may be wearing off, replaced by disapproval of wealthier tax dodgers.

Essential finds only 12 per cent of respondents (including 14 per cent of Coalition voters) are "bothered a lot" by "the feeling that some poor people don't pay their fair share", whereas 53 per cent (40 per cent of Coalition voters) are bothered a lot by "the feeling that some wealthy people don't pay their fair share".

Ask whether they're bothered a lot by the feeling that "some corporations" don't pay their fair share, and disapproval shoots up to 60 per cent, including 51 per cent of Coalition voters.

It's a sign of the times. It has finally dawned on us that the people with the overweening sense of entitlement are our business people.

They used not to be so arrogant, but more than three decades of neoliberal ideology – under which governments should do as little as possible to burden the private sector or restrict its freedom – have left business people convinced they're demi-gods, the source of all goodness and justly entitled to our approbation and genuflection.

They're the source of all jobs, and thus entitled to have their every demand satisfied.

Why should chief executives earn up to 300 times what their workers earn? Isn't it obvious?

Why should the chief executive's package rise by 8 per cent while his workers' wage rise is held down to 2 per cent because times are tough? Because I've just realised that Joe Blow over at XYZ Corp is getting more than me, and I'm better than him.

Why should companies doing legal contortions to minimise the tax they pay, hesitate to demand a cut in the rate of company tax in the name of creating jobs?

The developed world is still recovering from the carnage of the global financial crisis, caused by letting American banks do hugely risky things in the pursuit of higher profits and bonuses, confident in the knowledge that, should things come unstuck, the government would bail them out.

We weren't so silly as to let our own banks behave like that, but the years since then have seen a litany of banks mistreating their customers, as their managers put bonuses ahead of service and the four big banks compete single-mindedly for the highest rate of profit.

Meanwhile, journalists are uncovering a remarkable degree of lawlessness by other businesses: young people paid less than their legal entitlement, exploitation of foreign workers on visas, employers failing to pay in their workers' super contributions.

It's as though business people see themselves as so economically virtuous as to be above the law. Just a bit of red tape those gutless pollies have yet to clear away.

What's changed with the end of the era of neoliberalism, however, is the willingness of politicians on both sides to toughen up on the banks and other businesses.

They'll be paying more rather than less tax in future, and governments are already far less hesitant to regulate them more closely.

I see a lot more coming. Why? Because voters have got jack of arrogant business people.

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What you'd have to live on if you were poor

Speaking of the cost of living, how much do you need to live on? Surveys show most people's answer is: just a bit more than I'm getting at present. Trouble is, they keep saying that no matter how much their income rises.

One way to convince yourself you're not doing all that well is to compare what you earn with people of your acquaintance who're earning a lot more than you.

A better assessment would be to compare your finances with those of people a lot closer to the bottom – if only you knew any.

Not to worry. On Wednesday, Professor Peter Saunders and Megan Bedford, of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of NSW, will publish new "budget standards" for low-paid and unemployed Australians.

The study was funded by the Australian Research Council, with a quarter of the cost covered by donations from Catholic Social Services Australia, the United Voice union and the Australian Council of Social Service.

In a painstaking exercise, the researchers have put together, and costed, the baskets of goods and services different-sized families at these income levels would need to allow each individual – adult or child – to lead a fully healthy life.

So it's not a poverty line and it does take account of prevailing community standards, but it's the minimum amount required to satisfy basic needs.

"There is no allowance for even the most modest or occasional 'luxuries' and wastage was kept to an absolute minimum. The budgets are thus extremely tight," the researchers say.

For instance, low-income families are assumed to have a car, but it's a second-hand, five-year-old Toyota Corolla, kept for five years. Unemployed people have no car.

Because it's a healthy standard, its only allowance for alcohol is a couple of glasses a week, with no allowance for smoking.

Let's see how you fancy living on these budget standards (I've rounded the figures to the nearest $10 for ease of comprehension). Each of the low-paid categories assumes one person working full-time on the national minimum wage.

A single adult would need to spend $600 a week. A couple with no children would need $830. Add a child of six and that rises to $970. Add a second child, of 10, and it's up to $1170. A sole parent working part-time, with a child, would need to spend $830 a week.

Let's take a couple with two children. Their biggest expense would be rent, $460 a week for a three-bedroom unit in an outer suburb. Then $200 for food, $140 for transport, $140 for household goods and services, $80 for recreation (swimming lessons; bit of sport for the kids), $60 for education, $40 for personal care, $30 for clothing and footwear and $20 a week for out-of-pocket healthcare.

The budget standards for unemployed families are, perforce, a lot tighter.

Whereas the low-paid were assumed to shop at Woolworths and Kmart, unemployed people in the focus groups used to check the realism of the standards said they couldn't afford such stores and went to Aldi and discount stores. They chase specials and collect discount vouchers, make things last longer and waste nothing.

Even with this frugality, an unemployed single adult needs $430 a week. A couple without children needs $660, but that rises by $110 to $770 with one kid, then by a further $170 to $940 with a second kid. An unemployed sole parent with one child needs $680 a week.

It's true that economies of scale mean a couple needs only 1.5 times as much money as a single. But additional kids cost more, partly because older kids cost more, but also because you need to rent a bigger unit.

The good news is that a single adult on the minimum wage earns about $60 a week more than they need to maintain the minimum healthy standard of living, costing $600 a week. A sole parent working part-time, with one child, gets wages and welfare benefits of $45 a week more than their minimum living costs of $830 a week.

After that, however, the news is bad. A low-paid couple with no children earns $40 a week less than the $830 they need. After allowing for family benefits, a low-paid couple (one in full-time work and one doing some part-time work) with one child is almost $10 a week shy of their $970 healthy standard, while a couple with two children is short by $90 of the $1170 a week they need.

One of the great stains on our fair-go nation's conscience is the long-running attempt by governments of both colours to starve the unemployed until they find a (usually non-existent) job.

The study finds that the dole, plus any other welfare benefits for which the jobless are eligible, falls almost $100 a week short of the much tighter minimum healthy living standard for the single jobless.

A childless couple on the dole falls short by almost $110 a week and a couple with two kids is shy about $130 a week.

In our boundless generosity, however, we go easy on an unemployed couple with one kid (short by a mere $60 a week) and a jobless sole parent with one kid, short by a piddling $50 a week.

If only you and I weren't having such a struggle to maintain our own living standards, we could perhaps ask the pollies to be a tad more munificent.

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Abused public servants help bring Turnbull down

There's no clearer sign that the Turnbull government is in deep political trouble than the never-ending saga of the Centrelink robo-debt stuff-up.

A well-functioning government would have closed down the controversy more than a month ago. If the relevant senior or junior minister hadn't had the wit to do it himself, the Prime Minister would have told him to.

Instead, the controversy's been allowed to roll on, while the junior minister, Alan Tudge, and more particularly the man allowing himself to be described as general manager of Centrelink, Hank Jongen, have repeatedly denied that there's any problem with the automated debt recovery system that's been making life miserable for many Centrelink "customers", including many who, in truth, owe the government nothing.

To broaden the focus, this is the story of how a highly class-conscious government – which sides with the well-off "lifters" against the less fortunate "leaners" – has come adrift from political reality and is using and abusing its public servants to prosecute its war on those unfortunate enough to need to deal with Centrelink.

Its lifters-class sympathies have included the public service among the leaners-class, meaning it's been at war with its public servants, while using them to harass presumed welfare cheats.

Its class consciousness has blinded it to such simple truths as that, while you can always bully the top public servants into covering for you, when you mistreat the servants they stop warning you about the hazards you face and, ultimately, indulge in schadenfreude when you fall over the cliff.

As a class, public servants are not held in high esteem by the public. That's why the government has thought it safe to mistreat them, while also allowing the quality of service provided to the public to decline and using public servants to get tough with the many thousands of leaners imagined by the lifters to be ripping off the system.

Trouble is, when you oblige the public servants to deliver bad service to the public – phones that go unanswered, long waiting times, websites and phones that keep dropping out (not you, Tax Office) – or treat the public unreasonably, the punters blame the government.

As they should. Centrelink and Tax Office "customers" have votes, and their family and friends have votes, too. That counts treble when the "customers" are on the age pension.

First proof the government's at war with its public servants is that its determination to limit public service wages means it's failed to reach enterprise bargains with up to three-quarters of its staff.

One of the first acts of the Abbott government, like the Howard government before it, was to sack a bunch of department heads.

Nothing could be better calculated to make the remaining department heads fear for their jobs should they do anything to annoy the government.

Is it any wonder that when the bureaucrat really responsible for Centrelink, Human Services Department secretary Kathryn Campbell, who'd been refusing to speak to the media for weeks, had no choice but to front a Senate committee, she was full of denials and obfuscation?

No boss enjoys receiving frank and fearless advice, but only the dumb ones take steps to ensure they're surrounded by yes-persons.

The other way ministers limit the ability of their departments to pass on unwelcome advice is to interpose a bunch of young punks and political wannabes between them and their senior bureaucrats.

Successive governments' desire to avoid confronting unpleasant truths has prompted them to fill their departments with armies of public relations people – people who'd be of greater service to the public if they got behind a counter or answered a few phones.

It turns out that Jongen, the man who's happy to leave the public with the impression he's the general manager of Centrelink, has no responsibility for running it. He's just the department's "official spokesman".

He's the chief spin doctor – meaning when he knowingly misleads the public he can do so with a clear conscience. That's what he's paid to do. Apparently, the department has more than 30 people with "general manager" in their title.

The government's contempt for its public servants is reflected in the repeated rounds of "efficiency dividends" it imposes on its agencies.

These far exceed the improvements in labour productivity the private sector's able to achieve, and have become a euphemism for annual rounds of forced redundancies.

The public service union's claim that the 5000 jobs lost do much to explain the poor quality of Centrelink's service, as well as the government's mindless rush to use robots instead of humans, isn't hard to believe.

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Heartless government sools computer onto needy citizens

Of the loads of films I saw last year, the most memorable was Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake. I go to the movies for escapist entertainment, not to give my emotions a good workout but, even so, it left a lasting impression.

It was the story of a 59-year-old carpenter in Newcastle, England, whose cardiologist told him not to go back to work for a few months after he'd had a heart attack on the job.

What we saw was Blake's mistreatment at the job centre he went to for social security payments at the height of the Cameron government's austerity spending cuts.

It was run like an assembly line, with "clients" processed as fast as possible, with a complete lack of flexibility or consideration.

Nothing Blake said was listened to, but at his first sign of frustration he was rebuked for his utterly unacceptable behaviour and threatened with removal by security guards. He was repeatedly threatened with the "sanction" of having his dole suspended for such crimes as being late for his appointment.

He got nowhere when he visited the centre, had to hang on for ages when he phoned, and was always being told to fill out forms online. Small problem: he didn't have a computer and didn't know how to use one.

Sorry, online forms are "mandatory".

Why would a government treat its citizens so badly? Well, reading between the lines you saw the centre had been handed over to a private business. It probably underquoted to get the contract and had turned the centre into a sausage machine in the hope of saving enough on staff to make a profit.

I thought of Daniel Blake when I read of the way the Turnbull government is using an "automated debt recovery program" to harass former users of Centrelink.

It's using a computer program to go back several years, checking Centrelink benefit payments against records from the Tax Office, to look for apparent overpayments and demand the money be repaid.

Trouble is, the exercise is hugely prone to error. Eligibility for social security benefits is assessed on a fortnightly basis, whereas tax information is annual. The machine merely divides the annual figures by 26 and often gets the wrong answer.

Where the same employer's name has been recorded differently, the machine treats them as separate businesses, sometimes calculating "debts" that are thousands of dollars out.

The machine may send its demand to an old address, even though failure to respond within 21 days is taken as acceptance that the figure named is correct, and the trigger for debt collectors to be called in, with the addition of a 10 per cent "recovery fee".

The many leaks from appalled Centrelink staff suggest they've been discouraged from correcting obvious errors before the machine-generated demands are sent out, and discouraged from helping people in person, rather than just telling them to use the website.

It's clear this is a fishing expedition. You make what you know may often be erroneous claims for repayment, shift the onus of proof onto people with few records or resources, give them a scare, then sit back and see how much you rake in.

I confess to feeling much empathy for people struggling with the many digital tentacles of the ironically named MyGov website. I'm an accountant but I still struggle with its online tax return.

Its requirement for you to supply your spouse's income sets up a Catch 22 where neither you nor your spouse can submit a return without saying something you know isn't true.

This year I'm stuck on a section of the return which, when I try to save it and move on, just says ERROR. OK, what's the error? Doesn't say. But I know what it's thinking: that's for us to know and you to find out.

So far I've spent ages searching the site for the answer, to no avail. I'm waiting for the time and courage to do battle with the Tax Office's phone system - assuming that's still permitted.

Back on the Centrelink debacle, I've been amazed by the way the Centrelink boss, the junior minister, Alan Tudge, and the senior minister, Christian Porter, have each denied there's any problem.

Really? This is the way bureaucrats and politicians get their names into the history books for contributing to their government's demise.

So far they've mainly been picking on young people on the dole, but now they're moving on to invalids and age pensioners. Really? Courageous decision, minister.

What on earth is motivating them? Partly it's that, having made so much fuss about debt and deficit while in opposition, the government is having enormous trouble getting the budget deficit down.

It lacks the courage to tackle the big sources of rent-seeking by business interests, but is confident it can get away with cracking down on the tiddlers in social security.

It's worse than that, however. Porter and Tudge are from the Liberals' hard Right. You can see from their speeches and remarks they have little sympathy for people poor enough to need social welfare, and every sympathy for their own class, groaning under the weight of a tax rate of supposedly "almost 50 per cent".

Their sacred mission is to prevent the need for higher taxes by ensuring none of their department's "clients" get away with a dollar more than they're supposed to get.

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Pick on the weak and friendless to pretend to fix the budget

Did you know our social security system is so open to rorting that it's possible for some people to get more from benefits than they'd earn if they took a job? And we wonder why we have problem with debt and deficit.

This scandalous state of affairs was leaked to an  Australian newspaper by sources close to the minister for Social Services, Christian Porter.

Specifically, single parents with four children can get welfare payments of more than $52,000 a year if they don't work, but less than $50,000 after tax if they work and receive the median full-time wage.

Small problem with this appalling news. It's a cock and bull story.

The welfare experts took no time to demolish it.

For a start, it's a contrived example. How many people do you know with four dependent children? There must be some single parents with four kids, but they'd a small fraction of all welfare-dependent single parents and an infinitesimal fraction of the 5.2 million recipients of federal "income support".

Worse, it's a false comparison. If the sole parent took the job they'd still be eligible for the $32,000-odd in family tax benefits per year. By supposedly preferring to accept the "parenting payment single" of less than $20,000, they'd be passing up the median full-time wage of almost $50,000 after tax.

What Porter doesn't seem to know is that family payments are specifically designed to be the same whether parents are working or not, precisely to ensure they don't discourage parents on benefits from taking a job.

So the Minister for Social Services has grossly misrepresented the workings of his own system.

Relative to people like Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison, Porter seems smart and well-spoken, eminently capable explaining a tricky concept in simple words. He's next most likely to be treasurer.

So why did he risk his reputation by putting out a line that was so quickly and easily debunked?

Perhaps because he thinks it's his job to convince us that the allegedly unsustainable growth in welfare spending is the main reason for our debt and deficit.

And because it's the job of he and his ministerial offsider, Alan Tudge, to counter the Senate's reluctance to agree to a range of cuts in the dole and other welfare benefits by creating the impression in voters' minds that welfare spending is rife with rorts and rip-offs by the undeserving poor.

Also because the Liberal heartland is desperate to believe they won't have to pay higher taxes if the welfare bill can be chopped back to size. Worse, I suspect Porter and Morrison actually believe it.

In a speech a few weeks' ago Porter worked hard to demonise his own portfolio, grossly exaggerating the size of the problem.

Today's "welfare spend" is about $160 billion a year. This makes it the largest category of (federal) government spending, representing 80 per of all individual income tax collections, he says. (Except that personal income tax represents only about half of all the federal tax we pay. Oops.)

He wants us to assume most of this $160 billion goes on people who could work, but won't: dole bludgers, sole parent bludgers and people on disability pensions pretending to have bad backs.

Except that half the money goes to bludgers who don't want to work because they're over 65. Another quarter goes to bludgers with children (the family tax benefit) or young mothers wanting subsidised childcare so they can do their bludging at work.

Most of the alleged projected "unrestrained growth" in the welfare spend will come from the continuing retirement of the baby-boomer bulge and the success of investment advisers in helping people get the age pension despite their big super payouts.

Have you noticed how many political fights in recent times arise from the government's efforts to get penny-pinching spending cuts and tax changes through the Parliament?

There's the tax on backpackers, the removal of the "energy supplement" worth $4.40 a week or so to pensioners and people on the dole, the cuts in family payments that would hit sole parents hardest, the cuts to make people wait four weeks before they get the dole and raise the eligibility age for the adult dole to 25, and even the move to stop evil maternal double-dippers using employer-provided paid parental leave to prolong the period they have at home with the baby.

Porter says we can't continue to borrow money to fund today's welfare system growth because this would burden young Australians.

He avoids admitting that apparently we can continue to borrow money to cover a tax cut for people earning more than $80,000 a year, hugely expensive cuts in company tax, a much-delayed crackdown on multinational tax avoidance and a massive increase in spending on defence.

Heard of priorities, Christian?

These penny-pinching cost cuts aimed mainly at the socially disadvantaged and politically defenceless – if roughing up asylum seekers and their kids goes down so well with voters, why not extend the attack to bottom-of-the-pile Aussies? – are far from sufficient to make much impact on the budget deficit.

They show the government is near the bottom of the barrel in the quality of budget savings it's prepared to make.

It wants us to believe the federal budget is close to bankruptcy but, in truth, it's this government that's nearer to being morally, politically and economically bankrupt.

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How high-paid men have hijacked tax reform

It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his after-tax salary depends on him not understanding it, to misquote Upton Sinclair.

This may explain why there's a glaring weakness in the thinking of business people, economists and politicians who see countering bracket creep and cutting the top tax rate as the key "reforms" needed to "reward hard work" and increase participation in the labour force.

Joe Hockey's repeated claim that our tax system remains much the same as it was in the 1950s is silly but, as Professor Patricia Apps, of the University of Sydney, argues in a recent paper, it's true in one important respect.

Then, our system of levying income tax on the individual, rather than the joint income of couples, fitted well with our (very Australian) system of tightly means-testing welfare benefits on the basis of family income.

Why? Because, in those days, few women continued in paid employment once they were married and, certainly, once the kids started arriving.

What's changed is a decline in the fertility rate from about 3.5 children per female to 1.9, a rise in young women's academic attainment to levels exceeding young men's, and a desire by most young mothers to return to paid employment.

Get it? Without intending to we've moved away from having the individual as the unit of taxation – a choice that scores well on both efficiency and equity – to a "quasi-joint" system of taxing families.

In consequence, when one partner – usually the father – has a full-time job, and the child-caring partner thinks about returning to paid employment, her degree of participation is discouraged not just by marginal tax rates that have risen somewhat thanks to bracket creep but, far more significantly, by the rate at which the family tax benefit is withdrawn as the wife's income is added to the husband's.

This means women deciding whether to work, and how long to work, face "effective" marginal rates of taxation far higher than the top rate of 47 per cent faced by all the executives Hockey fears will become tax exiles at any moment.

Apps demonstrates from 2010 survey figures that, before a couple's kids arrive, women, on average, work almost as many hours as men. Women's hours fall markedly when the couple has at least one child of preschool age.

That's to be expected. But Apps shows that when the average couple reaches the stage where all dependent children are of school age, mothers' hours recover to only a little more than half those of the husbands'.

The gap is only a little narrower when couples reach the stage where both parents are still of working age but have no dependent children at home.

In other words, decisions made to reduce participation in the labour force in the preschool years tend to persist even as the kids grow up.

Why could this be? Surely not because "secondary earners" (aka mothers) face effective marginal tax rates in the high double figures. If so, countering bracket creep and cutting the top rate aren't likely make much difference.

Apps' analysis goes a long way towards explaining why rates of female participation in Australia are significantly lower than in comparable countries – even New Zealand – particularly when you remember our unusually high rates of part-time female participation.

If so, she also goes a long way towards identifying the area where tax reform is likely to be most effective in encouraging work effort and participation.

Apps uses Australian data to support an empirical truth long understood by tax economists, but long forgotten by other economists and never believed by high-paid businessmen (see opening quote): the price "elasticity" (sensitivity) of labour supply is not at all high for "primary" income earners (men with full-time jobs). Other studies show much higher elasticity for "secondary" earners.

This is common sense: full-time jobs tend to come in set lumps of 38 hours or so a week, whereas mothers have far more discretion over how many hours a week they want to work. It's mainly the shift from part-time to full-time that our unintended "quasi-joint" unit of taxation is stuffing up.

There's nothing new about high effective marginal tax rates. So why do economists and their high-paid male masters keep forgetting it?

Because if they can con the pollies into cutting the top tax rate rather than fixing the means-testing of family benefits, they pay a lot less tax whether or not the "reform" encourages greater work effort in general and whether or not they personally choose to work harder or take Wednesday afternoons off for golf.

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Oldies screw young in the labour market

If you're ever tempted to doubt that the world is run by older people who organise things to suit themselves and don't worry about any blowback on the young, consider how commonly employers resort to the practice of "natural attrition".

It's something businesses do when times are tough. They could lay off workers, but they choose a more considerate path: just stop hiring any new people, including replacing people who leave, and eventually get your numbers down to where you need them.

And all the oldies breathe a sigh of relief. Problem solved in the nicest possible way.

Except for one little thing: the oldies have just passed the buck to some unknown bunch of young people. What causes natural attrition to get quick results is the decision to abandon the annual intake of young people at the entry level.

For youngsters there's a form of bad luck that isn't widely recognised by those of us already ensconced in the workforce: to have the misfortune to be leaving school or university at a time when the economy has turned down and few employers are taking on recruits.

Kids complete their education bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only to discover the world of work doesn't want them. It might take them a year, even 18 months, to get a proper, full-time job. That can be terribly dispiriting.

It's common at such times for young people to be caught in a trap where they can't get a job because they lack experience, but they lack experience because they can't get a job.

It's an appalling thing for the rising generation to get off on such a wrong foot. It can take years to recover, if you ever do.

At the time of the global financial crisis in late 2008 and 2009, we were all hugely relieved when, as it turned out, we escaped serious recession. The official rate of unemployment rose from 4 per cent to just 5.8 per cent before falling back.

We were all off the hook. Well, only the oldies. The truth is there was a sharp downturn and employers did react by going into natural-attrition mode, with some even moving briefly to four-day weeks.

Great. What few people noticed was that much of the burden of adjustment was shucked off on to that year's crop of education leavers. How much concern for their welfare? Not a lot.

We do hear a lot about the trouble some older people find in regaining employment should they lose their jobs. It's a genuine problem and one we should care about.

But the unemployment problems of the old seem to attract a lot more public attention – and sympathy – than the similar problems of the young.

Research by the Brotherhood of St Laurence using HILDA – the household income and labour dynamics in Australia survey – finds those aged 55 and over account for just 8 per cent of the unemployed, whereas those aged under 25 make up more than 40 per cent.

So unemployment is concentrated among the young. And, historically, the sad truth is it's concentrated among the less educated and less skilled.

In the modern technologically driven workforce, there are many fewer jobs for people who quit school early and for those who don't acquire post-school trade or tertiary qualifications. What unskilled jobs remain tend to be casual and occupied by university students or mothers.

In 2008, according to the Brotherhood's figures, 45 per cent of the unemployed had failed to complete year 12, with another 20 per cent having gone no further than year 12. That's almost two-thirds.

People with trade qualifications made up just 16 per cent of total unemployment, with those with university qualifications accounting for an unusually high 19 per cent.

In more recent years, unemployment has been rising slowly while, within that, the rate of unemployment among 15 to 24-year-olds has risen more rapidly. Among those teenagers who are either in jobs or actively seeking them, the rate of unemployment earlier this year was 20 per cent.

But now get this: by 2012, according to the HILDA survey, the proportion of the unemployed with uni qualifications had jumped to 25 per cent.

To me, that's easily explained: years of weak growth in the economy are leading many employers to engage in natural attrition, which is limiting job losses among established workers, but making it much harder for university leavers to find work.

Governments can't be blamed for the employment practices of businesses, but they can be held accountable for their punitive treatment of the young unemployed – even if they are reflecting the adult world's lack of sympathy for youthful job seekers. Oldies seem convinced that the young's only problem is that they don't want to work and so need to be starved back to the grindstone.

The dole has been allowed to fall way below the age pension so that it's now less than $260 a week for a single adult. The "youth allowance" is even lower. Now the ever-so-caring Abbott government wants to raise the age of adulthood from 21 to 25 and extend the non-adult waiting period from one week to four weeks.

And that's before we get on to the way successive governments' high immigration policy is allowing employers to neglect the training of young workers.

Why young voters cop this cruddy deal so meekly I don't know.

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We've become a nation of graspers

Did you see an older bloke with a goatee beard ask Joe Hockey a question about the budget's changes to the assets test for the age pension on the ABC's Q&A program a few weeks back?

He was Dante Crisante, a retired chemist, according to a subsequent interview he did with the Financial Review.

A lot of relatively well-off retirees have been complaining about the changes, which could reduce or eliminate their entitlement to the pension. They've been wondering what changes they could make to their finances to get around the new rules.

Hockey probably assumed Crisante was asking on his own behalf. He replied that he wasn't an investment adviser. But Crisante was asking a policy question, aimed at highlighting the long-standing anomaly that someone's home is excluded from the value of their assets for the purposes of the assets test. (Bad luck for people who've rented all their lives.)

Turns out Crisante doesn't receive the pension and says he never wants to get it. Which means that the man who wanted to "end the age of entitlement", and who drew invidious distinctions between lifters and leaners, missed a golden opportunity to congratulate Crisante and hold him up as an example for other comfortably off old people to follow. Maybe put him up for a gong on Australia Day.

It's possible, however, that even had Hockey known Crisante didn't have his hand out for a handout, he wouldn't have been game to praise him for his self-reliance. He might have been afraid of offending too many people; too many of his own supporters (not that a Labor politician would have been any braver).

The point is, something bad has happened to Australians over the years: we've become a nation of graspers. There was a time when the comfortably off were too proud to put their hand out for the pension. "The pension is for those people who need it. I don't need it, so I won't be joining the queue at Centrelink, thanks."

But those days are long gone. These days we display our wealth by the suburb we live in, the flash house we live in, the flash car we drive and the flash clothes we wear. But none of that stops us arranging our affairs so as to claim a pittance more from the taxpayer.

I suppose it's a good thing there's now no shame attached to being an age pensioner. But it's gone too far when it means there's no shame in claiming a pension or part-pension you don't really need.

And, as I've experienced myself in recent years, there's a whole industry of financial advisers out there these days making their living – a lucrative one, by all accounts – advising older people on how to maximise their call on other taxpayers.

Not just how to minimise the amount of tax you pay on your superannuation – how to put as little as possible into the community kitty – but also how to maximise the pension and associated benefits you receive; how to get as much as possible out of the kitty.

We do all that, most other people do all that, then we wonder why our governments have so much trouble getting their budgets to balance. We even tell ourselves how worried we are about these governments leaving so much debt to be picked up by our grandkids.

Notice how it's always those terrible politicians doing terrible things to our grandchildren. It's never the collective consequences of their grandparents being selfish.

Actually, it's funny. An important part of our motive in using our last years to pay as little tax as possible and make the biggest claim on other taxpayers as possible is our desire to maximise our children's inheritance.

It's a form of selfishness we see as unselfish. Ripping off the system to help our children. Rip off your fellow taxpayers before they rip you off, a great philosophy of life to pass on. Surprisingly, selfishness is catching. Some people find their children even more anxious than they are to maximise their inheritance.

In vain do politicians protest – quietly, and only occasionally – that the billions lost in tax breaks on super every year are sacrificed to help people with their living costs in retirement, not to help the old maximise their kids' inheritance.

In the popular reaction to the latest changes to the assets test, angry oldies are talking of finding ways to prevent the government from cutting their pension. Move to a more expensive house, one far bigger than you need or want to look after?

Give a lot away to your kids in advance? The government has low limits on how much you can give away each year without reducing your pension entitlement, but that's OK, just lie to the government. Lying to governments isn't really lying, is it?

This wouldn't be the first time old people, in their mania for extracting the last dollar of supposed entitlement from the government, have done crazy things. Years ago people would keep thousands in non-interest-bearing cheque accounts so as to avoid reducing their pension.

Rather than losing one dollar of pension they preferred to lose two dollars of interest. Volunteer for the big banks to rip you off? Sure.

The government had to introduce "deeming" to stop pensioners from self-harming. We've become a nation of graspers.

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A fair go for the poor should be above partisanship

There was one thing I liked about last year's unfair budget. Mesmerised as they were by the Business Council, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey took leave of their political senses and were unfair to just about everyone, bar the well-off.

What's so good about that? Well, it meant the budget's unfair measures were overwhelmingly rejected by the public. No non-government-controlled Senate would ever have passed such measures.

It has taken most of the past year but, as we saw confirmed in this year's budget, Abbott has now abandoned or modified most of those nasties.

Trouble is – and this is my point – I fear Abbott and Hockey have now reverted to the standard cynicism demonstrated by their Coalition and Labor predecessors over the decades.

The fact is, most budgets contain unfair measures or continue unfair policies that should have been corrected, without arousing anything like the outcry last year's did.

Why not? Because most governments take care to reserve their unfairness exclusively for the poor and, in particular, for the people many Australians regard as the undeserving poor – the unemployed (who could all get jobs if they weren't so lazy) and sole parents (who are no better than they ought to be).

To most Australians, the only deserving poor are the elderly and maybe the physically disabled (provided their disability is clearly visible; anyone with a bad back is obviously a malingerer). The mentally disabled should pull themselves together.

Last year, when Abbott proposed to change the age pension from being indexed to wages (meaning it keeps up with incomes generally) to being indexed only to prices (meaning it doesn't) the public was outraged and the government has finally dropped the idea.

But the dole has been indexed to prices rather than wages for decades, causing it to fall further and further below the pension, without there ever being sufficient public disquiet to prompt any government – Labor or Coalition – to relent.

Governments of both colours have pushed people, mainly women, off the less inadequate "parenting payment" – what in less obfuscating days we called the sole parent pension – onto the more inadequate dole without any great protest from the public.

Of course, there are limits to our lack of charity towards the jobless. When, in one of his more notorious captain's calls, Abbott proposed denying every unemployed person under 30 access to the dole for six months of every year, we decided that was over the top.

But when the government relented and abandoned the idea in this year's budget, it replaced it with a plan for those under 25 to have to wait four weeks before their dole payments began, rather than the one week for everyone else.

Few people noticed, let alone cared. Yet no measure could be better calculated to make survival harder for people dependent on the dole. By the time the four weeks are up, any savings you may have had are gone, meaning that if some large unexpected expense arises you're done for.

Last week my co-religionists, the Salvation Army, reported the results of a survey of 2400 people from the 160,000 a year requesting emergency relief. Of those who responded to the survey, 88 per cent were on the dole, the disability support pension or the parenting payment. Only 5 per cent were employed and 4 per cent retired.

More than three-quarters were renters and 13 per cent were homeless. Respondents paid a median amount of $180 a week for accommodation, representing almost 60 per cent of their income. That left them with $125 a week – or less than $18 a day – to live on.

So their most pressing economic problems were the inadequacy of the benefit payments they received and the lack of affordable housing.

But this year's budget contained an initiative that deserves praise. The government has accepted the recommendation of the McClure review that it follow the New Zealanders by adopting an "investment approach" to welfare.

The idea is to use methods similar to those actuaries use to estimate risks and set insurance premiums to estimate the total amount of benefits likely to be paid to particular classes of welfare recipient over their lifetime.

Knowing how much it's likely to end up having to pay to support someone over the long term provides the governments with an incentive to "invest" in measures that will get them into lasting employment and thus save the taxpayer money.

If it encourages governments – and the Department of Finance – to be more far-sighted in their attitudes towards people on benefits, to spend extra money now to save paying more later, and to be more active in fixing people's problems rather than just passively handing out money, it will be a big improvement.

If, by quantifying the government's future liability if it fails to help people onto their feet, it encourages the politicians to do more evaluation of how well its programs work, and more experimentation to find what works and what doesn't, it will be a good thing.

You never know, it may even encourage politicians to be less cynical in their treatment of the poor and disadvantaged. To see concern about the poor the way someone who grew up in the Salvos would see it. To me, it's way beyond left and right.

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At present GDP is more misleading that usual

I could attempt to explain to you why the Bureau of Statistics is having such embarrassing trouble with its monthly estimate of employment, but I won't bother. It's horribly complicated and at a level of statistical intricacy no normal person needs to worry about.

What this week's labour force figures now tell us is that, though the rate of unemployment has been slowly drifting up since mid-2011 - when it was 5 per cent - it seems to have steadied this year and, using the smoothed figures, has stayed stuck at 6 per cent for the past three months.

This is reasonably consistent with what we know about other labour-market indicators, such as job advertisements and vacancies, claims for unemployment benefits and employers' answers to questions about hiring in the National Australia Bank's survey of business confidence.

It also fits roughly with what the national accounts have been telling us about the strength of growth in the economy. We know that when the economy is growing at its trend rate of about 3 per cent a year, this should be sufficient to hold the rate of unemployment steady.

The accounts told us real gross domestic product grew by 3.4 per cent over the year to March, and by 3.1 per cent over the year to June.

But now let me tell you something that, while a bit technical, is much more worth knowing than the gruesome details of the bureau's problem with the labour force survey.

One of our smartest business economists, Saul Eslake, of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has reminded us that GDP is only one of various summary indicators of overall economic activity provided by the national accounts. And the economy's peculiar circumstances over the past decade and for some years to come mean GDP is not the least misleading of the various measures.

Eslake says real GDP measures the volume (quantity) of goods and services produced within a country's borders during a particular period. (Actually, it doesn't include the many goods and services produced within households, which never change hands in a market.)

To estimate real GDP the bureau takes the nominal, dollar value of the goods and services produced, then "deflates" this figure by the prices of those goods and services relative to what those prices were in the base period.

We commonly take the value of the goods and services we produce during a period to be equivalent to the nation's income during that period. This easy assumption works for most developed economies most of the time.

But Eslake reminds us that "for an economy like Australia's, the prices of whose exports are much more volatile than those of other 'advanced' economies, abstracting from swings in the prices of exports (and imports) obscures a significant source of fluctuations in real incomes".

We've experienced a series of sharp swings in our "terms of trade" - export prices relative to import prices - over the past decade of the resources boom, which was interrupted by the global financial crisis in 2008-09. For the past three years, of course, mining commodity prices have been falling.

Trouble is, real GDP doesn't capture the effects of these swings. So the values of our production and our income have parted company, as they do every time our terms of trade change significantly. An improvement in our terms of trade causes our income to grow faster than our production, whereas a deterioration has the opposite effect.

This matters because of the chicken-and-egg relationship between production and income: we use the income we earn from our part in the production process to buy things and thus induce more production.

So if our real income slows or falls, soon enough this dampens our production.

However, the national accounts include a measure of overall economic activity that does capture the effects of movements in our terms of trade: real gross domestic income, GDI. It grew a lot faster than real GDP for most of the time between 2002 and 2011, but since then has grown much more slowly than real GDP (a big reason for our slowly rising unemployment).

Next Eslake says that as the resources boom moves into its third and final phase - with mining investment winding down and exports ramping up - real GDP growth will be an even less useful guide to what's happening to domestic income and employment.

This is because maybe 80 per cent of the income generated by resources exports will be paid to the foreigners who own most of our mining companies and who financed most of the new investment.

It's also because the depreciation of Australia's greatly enlarged stock of capital equipment and structures as a result of all the mining investment spending will now absorb a greater share of our gross income.

(A separate issue Eslake doesn't mention is that the highly capital-intensive nature of mining means the increased production of mineral exports will create far fewer jobs than you'd normally expect.)

If you've ever wondered about the difference between gross national product and gross domestic product it's that the former excludes all the income earned on Australian production that's owed to the foreign suppliers of our debt and equity financial capital, making it a more appropriate measure for us given our huge foreign debt and foreign investment in our companies.

If you've ever wondered what the "gross" in GDP, GNP, GNI etc means, it's short for "before allowing for the depreciation of our stock of physical capital".

So gross national income (GNI) is a better measure than gross domestic income (GDI), and net national disposable income (NNDI) is a better measure than GNI.

Which, by the way, explains why real NNDI is used as the base for all the further non-national-accounts-based modifications included in Fairfax Media's attempt to calculate a broader measure of economic welfare, the Fairfax-Lateral Economics wellbeing index, released each quarter soon after the publication of GDP.

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Why we care about morality - apparently

The good thing about holidays is getting time to read books. I' ll look at all the museos, oratorios, cappellas and duomos in Italy provided I can go back to my book when day is done. On this trip one book I read was Moral Tribes, by Joshua Greene, a young professor of psychology at Harvard.

One of the hottest areas of psychology these days is moral psychology - the science of moral cognition - which seeks to explain why we have moral sentiments and what use they are to us. It' s pretty coldly scientific and evolutionary, which may be disconcerting to readers of a religious disposition.

According to Greene and his confreres - another leading thinker in the area is Jonathan Haight, author of The Righteous Mind, which I' ve written about before - humans are fairly selfish individuals, but we are also highly social animals who like to be part of groups.

Groups, however, require co-operative behaviour, so we evolved moral attitudes to enable us to get along together in groups.

Biologists (and economists) have long stressed the importance of competition between us - survival of the fittest and all that - but it s not hard to see that humans' domination of the planet arises from our unmatched ability to co-operate with each other to overcome problems.

So humans are about competition and co-operation. Economists have schooled us to think of markets as all about competition - between sellers, between buyers and between buyers and sellers - but psychologists see markets as a prime example of human co-operation.

Co-operation through markets allows us to use specialisation - I produce what I' m good at, you do the same and we use the medium of money to exchange the things we ve produced - to increase our combined efficiency in production, leaving us all better off.

Studies have shown that people' s performance in well-known psychology games giving them a choice between selfish or altruistic responses can differ markedly between cultures. Turns out that people from cultures with more developed market systems tend to be less selfish and more co-operative.

So to these scientists, morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of co-operation within groups.

But why do we want to co-operate within groups? So our group can compete more effectively against other groups.

" Our moral machinery evolved to strike a biologically advantageous balance between selfishness (Me) and within-group co-operation (Us), without concern for people who are more likely to be competitors than allies (Them), " Greene says. This moral machinery includes our capacities for empathy, vengefulness, honour, guilt, embarrassment and righteous indignation, he adds.

The fact is that each of us belongs to a whole host of groups: our family, neighbourhood, workplace, occupation, nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sporting interest, political party and more.

The groups we belong to are the tribes we belong to. We feel a great loyalty to our groups, and greatly favour their interests over those of rival groups. This group selfishness and tendency to see the world as Us versus Them is tribalism.

So, much of the conflict we see around us - both within our country and, as we' ve become more conscious of in recent days, between countries and the groups within them - arises from tribalism.

Much of the conflict between tribes is simple self-interest - I favour my interests ahead of yours, and see them much more clearly than I see yours - but there are also genuine differences in values and disagreements about the proper terms of co-operation. One major source of disagreement in political life is between individual and collective responsibility.

Some disagreement arises from tribes' differing allegiances to what Greene calls " proper nouns" - gods, leaders, holy scriptures and holy places.

Obviously, tribally based morality gets us only so far. What Greene seeks is a "meta-morality" , which can help reduce conflict between tribes rather than just within them. To this end he reaches back to an old idea now out of favour with philosophers: utilitarianism.

(This is of relevance to economists because, though they 've spent the past 80 years trying to play it down, utilitarianism forms part of the bedrock on which the conventional economic model is built.)

According to Greene, utilitarianism answers two basic questions: what really matters and who really matters. What matters most is the quality of our experience. Economists call this " utility" and the rest of us call it "happiness" .

Who matters most is all of us, equally - otherwise known as the Golden Rule.

Thus Greene summarises utilitarianism as " happiness is what matters and everyone' s happiness counts the same. This doesn 't mean that everyone gets to be equally happy, but it does means than no one' s happiness is inherently more valuable than anyone else' s ."

He claims this meta-morality involves a moral system that can acknowledge moral trade-offs and adjudicate among them, and can do so in a way that makes sense to members of all tribes.

It s a nice thought. Somehow I think it will be a while before we measure up to that ideal. But it s always good to have a vision of what we should be aiming for and how we can move towards it.

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