The cold fact is that most income is not distributed,’ says the American economist Thomas Sowell, ‘it is earned.’ Although there are concerns over ‘who’ will benefit from Papua New Guinea’s record economic growth, it should be unsurprising that most of this wealth will continue to levitate toward resource companies. To boldly assert that fortune should be ‘distributed’ is to misunderstand the nature of wealth in a free market and capitalist economy. PNG’s unprecedented economic growth over the past decade is expected to continue and even increase in the coming decades. It’s worth recalling that nearly all of this is […]

Ask a 20-year old how to get rich, says Keith Campbell, and they will likely give you three answers: “I can either be famous on reality TV, or I can go start a dot-com company and sell it to Google in about a week, or I can go work for Goldman Sachs and just steal money from old people.” Today the idea of instant gratification rightly faces a tough audience. Reward without effort closely resembles the entitlement culture of expectation minus responsibility found not just with young people. In criticising instant gratification, however, it becomes easy to blame two key […]