Its very difficult to have a discussion about politically correct semantic rubbish. This is nothing but repeated the political correct mantra's of an academic elitist, trying to promote using the same failed institutions and political approaches creating the problems.

Noel, you don't have the will capacity nor understanding to do anything but use semantics to make you feel good. I bet the blokes at the local pub could come up with more constructive answers than this learned drivel. Why don't you say something useful, if you can.

Well there ya go Noel, you'll be fighting a losing battle simply to get taken seriously.

Some say love makes the world go round. Well it doesn't. Greed does, or more to the point, profit motive. Infuse business with ethics and all you have is an entity ripe for takeover.

This article covers so much ground it'd need several volumes to convince any point-nosed economist to consider it. Nice to dream, though.

Greed doesn't make the world go around, but it seems to at the moment because it has become the orthodox paradigm. Money and material possessions/conspicuous consumption is seen as indicative of value as a person. To replace that goal with something else I don't see as a task that is impossible or even that hard, but it does present many problems.

To create an ethical understanding in the business world, as has just been mentioned, is seen as weakness, or inefficiency. In reality, many business people are willing and eager to engage in areas of, for example, triple bottom line accounting, corporate social responsibility, business ethics codes etc. This, I like to believe, is because they regard themselves as more than businesspeople, they are members of a society, of a world, as well as parents/children/siblings of others, as well as a moral self that most people are keen to develop.

The mindset of the modern world, I strongly believe, is a product of the reaction of the baby boomers generation, and their parents, to both the horror of the reality of the stories of the second world war and human rights understandings; and the uneasiness of the cold war and property, civil and political rights. This reaction created a system of rights as the key feature of ethics and politics over and at the expense of virtue based theories and by and large over duty based theories. One's place in the world was about what they were entitled to as a person, not what they were obliged to be as a person, or how they were obliged to treat others (and Others), especially anonymous others.

Like the generation that created it, this system will pass with the realisation of its faults. What it will pass into is the cause for concern.

Yes, the very first post on this topic highlights the difficulty of breaking through the resistance of entrenched ideologies. I have found it illuminating (and sometimes saddening) to read through the posts in this particular 'zine which purport to represent the "ordinary" person in the street. If we are to regard readers of OLO as a microcosm of Australian socio-political thought then blog streams provide a useful indication of the kinds of opposition to be found when not preaching to the converted.

It is for this reason that it apears that education is the key to social change. Yes, a lot of time and preparation is spent looking for quick fixes, but I suggest that to turn around existing mind sets, especially those of older Australians, would take a cataclysmic change. By which time it would be too late as the avoidance of such cataclysmic events is precicesly what is being argued for.

As well as tilting at windmills in the present perhaps it is not yet too late to ensure we don't perpetuate abuse of the planet or each other in the future? We have made a right old stuff up of our guardianship of this planet which each one of us posting here will one day sign out from, leaving the next generation to cope with our mistakes.

It would seem imperitive that to help those in the future with our problems, we should start now educating them and providing them with the tools to ensure they don't perpetuate our mistakes.

The opening line of:
"We live in a world where, according to Jeffrey Sachs in Time Magazine (March 2005) more than 20,000 people die each day because of extreme poverty." This reminds me of the quote "lies, damn lies and statistics."
The statistics are not explained or put into context. 20,000 deaths a day equals 7,300,000 a year. If we added another 7.3 million poor people to the present annual population increase and we would be alot poorer.
What to do?
Increase the number of deaths and we are heading into the right direction and the only way to do that legally is to make "war' and "killing" sustainable.
War and killing is becoming more commonplace in the world.
To make the world rich we need to convince the poor to die for the cause.

"In 1960 the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest countries was 30:1." I'm guessing that those figures are from the New Economic Foundation's "Growth isn't working - relieving poverty", although I can't immediately locate them. But they are wildly different from data in Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist," which drew on impeccable sources. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began just over 200 years ago, there had been little change in incomes for millennia. Looking at world income quartiles, by the end of the unprecedented income growth of the 20th C, those in the lowest quartile had reached the level of the second quartile in 1900, something their ancestors could not have dreamed of. Between 1960 and 2000 there was a great reduction in poverty, as China, India and other Asian nations had phenomenal rates of growth, raising the living standards of their huge populations. Those who missed out are generally in African countries beset with bad government and war, and with a relatively small share of world population. So the starting point for this article appears to be flawed. And some of the prescriptions are out of touch with any feasible reality.