Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 The Experience of Economic Reform
- Chapter 2 Incomes and Their Meanings
- Chapter 3 Jobs, Work and Fairness in the Wake of Labour Market Reform
- Chapter 4 Working Families: Struggling with the Costs of Reform
- Chapter 5 Civil Society and Communities
- Chapter 6 Politics, Power and Institutions
- Chapter 7 Judgements on Economic Reform
- Appendix A Chronology of Economic Reform
- Appendix B Methods and Procedures: Middle Australia Project
- Appendix C Supplementary Tables
- Appendix D Income and Equivalent Household Income
- Notes
- Index
Chapter 7 - Judgements on Economic Reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 The Experience of Economic Reform
- Chapter 2 Incomes and Their Meanings
- Chapter 3 Jobs, Work and Fairness in the Wake of Labour Market Reform
- Chapter 4 Working Families: Struggling with the Costs of Reform
- Chapter 5 Civil Society and Communities
- Chapter 6 Politics, Power and Institutions
- Chapter 7 Judgements on Economic Reform
- Appendix A Chronology of Economic Reform
- Appendix B Methods and Procedures: Middle Australia Project
- Appendix C Supplementary Tables
- Appendix D Income and Equivalent Household Income
- Notes
- Index
Summary
[Economic reform] implies the reconciliation of three issues that cannot be reconciled without fault: these are, first, maintaining the strengthening competitivity [sic] in the rough winds of world economy, second, avoiding sacrifice in terms of social cohesion and solidarity, and, third, doing all this under the conditions and by means of the institutions of free societies.
Ralf DahrendorfWhat does economic reform do to us? What does it do to the society? Has economic reform, or economic restructuring, or freeing up the markets, or globalisation, gone too far? Or about as far as it needed? Or even not far enough? How do we decide? On what criteria should we decide? Ask those questions and, as with the national conversation, your conversations with your friends will most likely change beat. More probably it will change from a conversation to a clamour of voices, each urging passionately, with the certainty of conviction, that the judgements must be made with an eye to history, or not at all in terms of history but in terms of what the global economy demands of us. Another pragmatic and reasonable friend will try to say that it's what the people choose that will decide on whether enough is enough. And then someone else again, probably me, will say that the very problem with such wholesale structural change is just that the people cannot decide when enough is enough. But the clamour of voices goes on, and we soon see that there is no consensus about the new consensus.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Experience of Middle AustraliaThe Dark Side of Economic Reform, pp. 168 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003