Life's Lessons

Posted by Wayne Wood on Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Mark Latham has achieved his aim of deflecting attention from Simple Simon’s poor poll results by hyping his ’saving plan for low income families’.

Mr Latham said breaking the poverty cycle was crucial in overcoming many social ills, such as welfare dependency and crime. “If you want to do something about the long-term cost to government of welfare and policing and social breakdown … the best way of doing it is ending poverty.

I agree, but the best way to reduce poverty is to improve the public’s ‘financial literacy’ (FL), not give them handouts that will be swallowed up by increased fees (not widely understood by the great majority of consumers, including, I suspect, Mr Latham) that continue to inflate the profits of our financial institutions. His statement,

Working Australians have had a taste of economic ownership and not surprisingly, they want more. Not the cars and refrigerators that their parents aspired to but real economic assets: equity investments, business ownership and financial nest-eggs.

will simply cause a lot more grief amongst low income families, unless they have a better understanding of how to invest.

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Posted by Wayne Wood on Thursday, September 18, 2003

I was just thinking about the last time I wore shoes. Since ceasing work in an office I find that the occasions where I have to wear ‘proper’ footwear are becoming less and less. Going to work these days involves donning a pair of bathers and an Austswim instructors shirt to provide a good role model for all the littlies, ensuring that their skin is not subjected to the brutal ravages of the sun that these days require me to regularly have potential skin cancers surgically removed or burnt off with liquid nitrogen.

What brought up the subject was talking to my son in Brisbane last night, arranging to visit him on my way to South America in November, promising to always wear sandals so that we would be rejected as hostages if captured by the Sentosa Luminosa, the Argentine paramilitary or the remnants of Pinochet’s ‘disappearing squads’. My son said that he would greet any demands for ransom with “Never heard of him”.

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Posted by Wayne Wood on Friday, September 5, 2003

In response to the question

I was wondering more whether the antipodean Aristotle might have a range of Op Ed commentators in mind whose prose might “make the heart skip a beat?” Whose legacy might be enduring?

posed by Geoff, in this blog Chris mentioned the name Charles Bean

whose guardianship of the War Memorial (Bean selected the site and laid down the principles for its displays) was a theatre of conflict in the 1980's.

Until I read his name in Chris’s blog, I’d never heard of CEW Bean (probably because I don’t read those interminable boring dialogues in the History Wars blogs) so I thought I’d Google a little in an attempt to get up to speed and not embarrass my fellow Armadillos by a conspicuous lack of erudition. I quickly came across this site and was depressed when I read about how little we honour those writers who labour mightily to create our heroes. Flicking through the site I came across Australian Military History: An overview and thought I’d go for a surf.

WARNING: This does go on a bit and is worthy of being classified as a Strocchi.(n. turgid, overlong and uninteresting)

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Posted by Wayne Wood on Tuesday, September 2, 2003

We watched the first doco ‘The Topic of Cancer’ ten years ago while our son David was in the middle of chemotherapy treatment. At the time we were certain that he would pull through and consequently found the program interesting but not particularly upsetting.

Even when the David in the program died between the first and second parts, we thought, nah, different cancer, our son was going to be all right, he was strong, he was good …. Unfortunately there must be something in that saying ‘Only the good die young’ …..

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Posted by Wayne Wood on Thursday, August 28, 2003

In the late 1800s, economist and avid gardener Vilfredo Pareto established that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. While gardening he later observed that 20% of the peapods in his garden yielded 80% of the peas that were harvested. And thus was born a theory that has stood the test of time and scrutiny. The Pareto Principle or the 80:20 Rule has proven its validity in a number of other areas such as time management,, selling financial planning services,, recruitment firms, it has even been suggested as a mechanism for;

A computational model for the distribution of wealth among the members of an ideal society. It is determined that a realistic distribution of wealth depends upon two mechanisms: an asymmetric flux of wealth in trading transactions that advantages the poorer of the two traders and a non-stationary creation and destruction of individual wealth. The former mechanism redistributes wealth by reducing the gap between the rich and poor, leading to the emergence of a middle class. The latter mechanism, together with the former one, generates a distribution of wealth having a power-law tail that is compatible with Pareto’s law.

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