Veronika Wild

-Image generated by Microsoft Bing AI  Below is the World Population Clock – it shows the number of people being born every minute. Although birth rates are slowing the global population is still growing at the rate of 80 million people per year. We'll come to why this matters in a moment, but let's first take a look at how we got here. How we got here As you can see from the following graph, until the Industrial Revolution in the C18 th populations remained small and static – under 1 billion globally, since the beginning of agriculture and were constantly kept in check by war, famine and disease.  Many children died at birth or in infancy and many mothers died in childbirth which meant not only that fewer children reached reproductive age, but that although many women did indeed have large numbers of children, others did not live long enough to do so.   With improvements in technology, medicine, diet, sanitation and income, people lived longer and popula...

A smiling and thoughtful Professor Stephen Bell talks about the new book he has co - written with Dr Michael Keating On Saturday, thanks to my walking buddy, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Stephen Bell. Professor Bell is head of the University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies.  Together with Dr Michael Keating, who has headed three Government departments, including most recently the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, he has just released a new book “ Fair Share –-competing claims and Australia’s economic future,” which looks at rising inequality in Australia and what we can or should do about it. The book explains that like most Western economies, we too are facing growing inequality with declining living standards for many – or at least no improvement, as well as slow economic growth and structural unemployment. While technological change, globalisation and “finacialisation,” low wages and low taxes have be...