Over the last few decades, the Western world has had an increasingly specialised workforce, with workers trained in narrow skills, for increasingly narrow positions. However, the more narrow our jobs have become, the less capable we have become in inventing…
At the end of 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed that close to two-thirds of all Australians had completed a degree or apprenticeship. The growth in the number of people attending a university or TAFE has risen out…
Lifetime employment has long been the cornerstone of corporate governance in Japan. College graduates at large firms have traditionally been guaranteed employment until retirement. These graduates, almost exclusively men, are guaranteed job security in return for complete loyalty to their…
It’s May 26, 2016 and Donald J. Trump attends a presidential rally in Bismarck, North Dakota. “We’re going to make America wealthy again,” he tells the crowd of mostly white, mostly middle-aged men. “You have to be wealthy in order…
Gertrude Stein originally called those who returned from World War I a ‘lost generation’, disoriented, wandering directionless through life, battered and broken by the war and unable to contribute to literary endeavours. Today’s youth face not a war of arms,…
In Political Liberalism, John Rawls argues that, “political power is always coercive power backed by the government’s use of sanctions, for government alone has authority to use force in upholding its laws” (Rawls 1993, p. 136).[i] In saying as much, Rawls is echoing a commonly held belief: that the state has the power to coerce its citizens, and this coercion prevents citizens from breaking the law. In most modern states, citizens are routinely threatened with arrest and incarceration if they do not abide by the state’s legal system. The language of “authority” is often used to justify this coercive action (Goffman 1982; Morris 2004, p. 196; Weber 1947).[ii]
In 1974, the philosopher Robert Nozick came up with the idea of an ‘experience machine’, a thought experiment which involved the following situation: Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could…
In his treatise on free will, philosopher Sam Harris claims that if an act is formulated in our subconscious then that act cannot be said to be willed by us. A reflex action to catch a ball, an instinctual action…
In previous centuries divisions of society were mended and band-aided by communal meeting areas: Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and other religious and civic halls. The decline of religion, or at least the decline of religious attendance, has seen the decline of…
Reading the letters of old writers and poets from previous centuries, you get the sense that they knew the ‘big events’ happening in the world at the time. These days, those “big events” are screened into our houses everyday, yet…