Australians are getting poorer - but it has nothing to do with immigrants | Tom Westland
We shouldn't be blaming immigrants for our economic slide, we are wasting our own resources through political laziness and incompetence
- Tom Westland is a Canberra economist and writer
One of the reasons that economic growth is desirable is that it makes people more pleasant to be around. When we feel our wallets getting fatter, we tend to be more generous to those around us. This doesn't mean that rich people are nicer than poorer people. But a given individual is usually better to be around when their financial situation is improving - they might buy a couple of rounds at the pub, say - than when it's stagnating.
What is true of people is also true of societies, as Benjamin Friedman has argued. Citizens of a growing economy are less violent to each other and more hospitable to immigrants. Which brings me to the extraordinary outbreak of venom in Australia recently. As Antoun Issa argued in the Guardian, the sheer tonnage of undisguised hatred in the media of late is as extraordinary as it is worrying. And while it's easy to dismiss the comments of those such as Rowan Dean or Prue MacSween as attention-seeking, it would be focusing too much on the supply of racist material and not enough on the demand for it.
Related: This is not 'natural selection': east Africa is in the grip of a famine emergency | Phoebe Williams
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