One of the lectures, entitled “ Australia is fricking amazing!” by Justin Wolfers was an ecstatic eulogy celebrating Australia’s achievements and institutions.

In my opinion, almost everything said was correct and important. The trouble is with what it didn’t say, and the resulting grossly misleading overall account given.

Australia is indeed remarkably good on many dimensions and can claim to be one of the “best” counties in the world to live. But there are many dimensions on which we are appallingly bad. Following are brief notes on several, supporting the case that we are headed in a catastrophically wrong direction, which we totally fail to grasp let alone deal with.

The lecture does not refer to the abundant evidence that the quality of life is now falling. Consider the rising rates of social breakdown, struggle, homelessness domestic violence and, above all, inequality. Increasing numbers can’t pay the bills. Our biggest health problem now is probably depression. Around 1/3 of young people today are reported to suffer loneliness. Three quarters of young people realise that their conditions will be worse than those their parents had. ( Eckersley, 2025.)

Australia is one of those primitive and barbaric societies that has unemployment. It is totally unnecessary and easily eliminated. We actually use it as a means to fight inflation, although there is no clear case that this works. The main reason we have it is to make sure workers will be grateful for whatever jobs the capitalist class offers them.

This is a society that allows more than 120,000 people to be homeless. It lets the provision of housing be determined not by what is needed but by “market forces”, that is by whatever will maximise the profits of developers. Consequently, small low-cost humble but adequate houses are not built while the average price of a house in Sydney has now risen to $1.7 million. On the 23 October ABC news it was said that on average people without a home live 28 years less than the average person.

Australians do not want refugees to come here and we go to great and expensive trouble to keep them out. Australians are not very interested in cutting greenhouse emissions even though we might be the worst contributor in the world given our coal exports (which we do not include in our stats). We are busily opening new coal mines and gas wells.

Our environmental situation is alarmingly bad. We have the world’s third highest soil carbon loss. We have lost more species than any other country, mainly because of the destruction of habitat, yet we still log native forest and have the rich world’s worst land clearing rate, at least 500,000 hectares of land every year. For every hectare of woodland cleared, about 20 birds, 150 reptiles and five mammals are lost. ( Bush Heritage Australia 2025.) The Murray Darling ecosystem continues to be damaged because too much water is being extracted, despite decades of chatter and expenditure.

Australians are voraciously consumers, with little awareness or concern that resources are dwindling. Our new houses are the biggest in the world. We love SUVs. We can see nothing problematic about going for a drive or jetting away to Bali for holidays or renovating the kitchen. On average, we each buy 56 new clothing items, 15 kg, every year.

We have a government that will not deal with gambling or the mining industry (which exports half our gas at no benefit to us) or fix the tax and super industries or get rid of negative gearing or tax capital gains properly. Australians will not tolerate any move that threatens wealth acquisition, especially high housing prices.

When a McBride blows the whistle on institutional behaviour that is contrary to the public interest what do we do? That’s right, we put him in jail. We put 10-year-old kids in jail, which makes them into better criminals. We have eagerly signed up at vast expense to assist the US to fight its coming war with China. Many of us are racist. We supply weapons to Israel. We refuse to get rid of the monarchy. We aren’t concerned about nuclear weapons. Our record on the treatment of our native people is also amazing. They are 3% of the population but make up about 30% of prison inmates, about a third of them live in poverty, and their “disease burden” is twice the Australian average.

The lecture constitutes an enthusiastic endorsement for our economic system, driven by market forces and the quest for limitless growth in affluence and GDP. The lecture shows no understanding of the reasons why this is not just absurd but is now suicidal. There is no sign of recognition that we have grossly exceeded the limits to growth, that the amount of producing and consuming going on is far beyond sustainable and that this has taken us through seven of the nine major “planetary boundaries”. There is no reference to the fact that there is now a global degrowth movement alarmed that this “poly-crisis” is leading us to catastrophic global breakdown. The reductions in rich world “living standards” and GDP required to enable a sustainable and just society are enormous, possibly around 20% of Australia’s present per capita levels of consumption. (For the supporting case see Trainer 2021.)

Wolfers attributes our amazing status primarily to the institutions we have. He refers to last year’s Nobel Prize winners who argued that the success of rich countries is due to the “inclusive” nature of their institutions while the failing states have “extractive” institutions. Neither they nor Wolfers reveal any understanding that the fundamental causes of inequality in global wealth and poverty lie in the morally rotten institutions that determine economic activity. Poor countries are poor primarily because they are condemned to adhere to a development model which gears their resources and productive capacity to enriching foreign corporations and rich world shoppers. They are trapped by unrepayable debt into accepting IMF conditions that oblige them develop extractive industries and grant favourable conditions to foreign investors, rather than develop the things that gear their resources to the needs of their impoverished people. One result is that a net $2.5 trillion of wealth flows out of poor countries to rich countries every year, not to mention the environmental damage and health consequences left there. ( See Hickle et al, 2021.) In an economic system geared to meeting needs, and not profit in the market, this would not happen. (See my lengthy critique of the 2024 Nobel prize.)

Central among our cherished institutions is unquestioning commitment to an economic system driven primarily by market forces and profit. Few seem at all concerned by the fact that the market responds to the interests of richer people. It produces not what is not most needed but what will maximise profit, which is always production to meet the demand of richer people. So no small, humble but adequate houses are produced, but big resource squandering McMansions are built because higher income people are willing to pay for them.

Wolfers insists that we are marvellous and on the right track. Someone should tell him that there is now a considerable and surging collapse literature explaining that the track is leading to a cliff edge. Resources are dwindling, the life support ecosystems of the planet are being shredded, inequality is going through the roof, the resulting deprivation of the deplorables is fuelling depression and rage and the emergence of fascism.

There is no way out of this poly-crisis unless the need for large-scale degrowth to radically simpler lifestyles and systems is embraced. But this society is totally incapable of doing that; it does not even understand the predicament we are in. The coming time of great troubles now cannot be avoided. Your only hope is that those pioneering simpler lifestyles and systems will have established enough alternative illustrative ventures to enable a sane path to be built, on the rubble.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.