Every other day it seems there's a new set of data pointing to Australia's increasing economic wealth relative to other developed countries.
On Friday it was a rise in the number of people in work. Our unemployment rate has fallen to 5.5 per cent, compared with a figure of 10 per cent for the United States.
While key sectors of the US economy such as the auto industry are still on life support, investment is flooding into resource projects in Australia. The economy is so buoyant that most experts predict a fourth successive interest rate rise when the Reserve Bank meets in two weeks from now.
Australia's economy has come a long way since 1986, when then federal treasurer Paul Keating told John Laws that Australia risked becoming a banana republic. Then a decade ago, at the height of the dot com boom, Australia was perceived to have missed opportunities in the IT sector and was branded an 'old economy'. But a combination of good fortune and good management since then has put Australia ahead of the pack, at least for now.
There is no mistake that it can be a good thing to be wealthy. It's what you do with your wealth that is often problematic.
The Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Hartcher recently quoted a survey of 52 resource-rich countries and found that only four had managed to extract a real national benefit from nature's bounty: Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia and Botswana. Along with the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, Australia is one of just a handful of truly resource-rich nations 'to have made it all the way through the obstacle course to become First World countries'.
However it's one thing to avoid squandering a nation's wealth through corruption or mismanagement, and another to use the wealth to develop a better society in the moral sense. Wealth can and should have a social dividend.
Melbourne Business School philosopher in residence John Armstrong wrote about the 'noble' use of wealth in Friday's Australian Financial Review, in the context of the issue of executive remuneration.
He argued that wealth can enable a person to flourish if it is used to 'nourish the soul'. But if people use their money for 'ugly, ignorant, unimaginative or banal purposes, then they lack a moral title to their wealth'.
'It is good that a family live in a beautiful house — if they love it for its beauty; it is