In my younger days I must admit that I owned a yacht that was named after a character from “Brave New World”.

Such naivety in youth.

I think this article lays out the situation quite clearly, and unfortunately there is no bright spot on the horizon.

The more both men and women work, the higher prices become.

The more both men and women divorce, the more demand for housing, and the higher the mortgage becomes.

The more both men and women work and divorce, the less children will ever see both parents.

So the children are now raised by the state, and ultimately they are owned by the state.

Very well written.
Yep, a singe working parent used to be able to raise 5 kids. Now even rasinig kids is an "industry".
Typical of our modern economy: we manufacture less and less, we export all our best ideas overseas, and we destroy families in the name of Profit and ideology.

Western civilisation...it would be a nice change.

It is fairly unusual for a piece on OLO to be so perceptive about a problem, and have no answer at the end to comfort us.

But as a description of the problem, it is right on the money.

The basic economics of the money merry-go-round, with more cash chasing more goods in a never-ending upward spiral. Spot on.

The tendency of governments to ensure a problem lasts forever by creating a department whose continued livelihood depends upon their inability to solve it. Painfully accurate.

Sadly, the only permanent cure would be for us to endure - not just a recession, but a full-blown depression. Complete with soup kitchens, dole queues, patching clothes, and thirtyfive percent unemployment.

Because it is the most difficult thing in the world to take stuff away, once it has been given. It is not as if we could wean ourselves off our addiction to goods that we have become accustomed to. It is an addiction, pure and simple, because we have been used to injecting our homes with stuff that makes us feel good, but that strictly speaking, we do not need.

I am a prime offender, by the way. This is not an exercise in finger-pointing. My life and lifestyle have followed exactly this pattern, so I am really speaking from personal experience. But I also know that if I were to suddenly turn my home life into an exercise in pure subsistence, with no excess food, no wide-screen tv, no theatre or cinema etc., I would be as miserable as sin.

As it is extremely unlikely that we will experience depression (unless of course we donate our GNP to the rest of the world via carbon trading - but that's another story), we have to manufacture for ourselves what economists call a "soft landing".

But how? Beats me.

My own experience following a family break-up in infancy is that a close and loving relationship with one's mother (which I lacked) is a vital aspect of becoming a well-rounded adult.

Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman found that gains in early childhood intervention come predominantly from focusing on families in which children had a high risk of incarceration and a low chance of sustained (if any) employment. There is no evidence to support the widespread intervention favoured by the Rudd government.

As I recently wrote to The Australian,

"If the left wishes to compete on ideas, those ideas must be evidence-based rather than simplistic wishful thinking. The “huge increase in public and private education” sought by Dennis Glover (Opinion, 25/9) is no guarantee of economic success – the relationship between education and economic growth is very complex, and the success of growth-oriented policies in one area is dependent on complementary and supporting policies in other areas. A comprehensive understanding of how policies interact is required.

For example, there is no evidence that forcing those who prefer to leave school early to complete Year 12 will lead them to more skilled jobs and higher wages and will boost productivity and growth. The driving force here is business opportunities for profitable investment and growth, and extra schooling for students at the lower end of the spectrum will not significantly change this. Similarly, learning is a dynamic process which needs to be inculcated in early childhood - training schemes for poorly-educated older workers are inferior in gaining them employment to lower minimum wages, wage subsidies and flexible industrial relations regulation.

As for increased education spending boosting innovation and high-tech exports, the problems lie elsewhere. Some factors we cannot control, e.g. the need to be close to major markets, others we can, e.g. with light-handed government regulation which fosters entrepreneurial spirits and a tax system which fosters wealth generation and retention. In addition, Heckman has found that reforms in the administrative structure of education and infusion of incentives and competition are far more likely to be effective than additional spending on public schools."

As my Boss used to say I don't want to hear your problems, I want to hear your solutions...
PS. The dig at the end was a bit sad, are you saying that they are less then you because they haven't had kids. I would make the point that half the pop don't physically have kids are you saying they would unable to help or understand these problems as well. Or were you just having a poke, trying to score some cheap points.

Excellent piece. The description of the mechanism by which an issue becomes an industry is very accurate.

This piece could only have been written by a woman, as a man would have been immediately howled down as "patriarchal" or one of the other meaningless epithets designed to avoid examination of critical flaws in the outcomes achieved by the feminist movement, few of which were predicted by the theorists.

Increasingly, those "uber-feminists" at the top of our society are disconnected from the aspirations of "ordinary" women and their partners and children. Extremists have dominated the discussion for so long that we have almost lost sight of how skewed it has become.

The sex discrimination commissioner released her own press release a couple of days ago, calling for investigation of ways in which men who wish to participate in rearing their children may be allowed flexible working arrangements. She went so far as to suggest a separate "Families Commissioner" (presumably so as not to undermine her own feminist role) to administer breaches of such a scheme. That suggestion has been met with stony silence from all around. I wonder why?