Recently in Western Australia there has been some discussion about the problems of youth - falling education standards, lack of respect for authority and for the law, bad behaviour with motor vehicles and in other ways.

As usual when these matters are discussed, several people have written to the newspaper advocating the re-introduction of corporal punishment in schools. It was abolished in Western Australian schools some years ago. One man described how he and his cousin had misbehaved at school one day. He got the cane, his cousin got the birch, and they never did it again.

Many people have asked me if the huge stimulus packages being tried by governments around the world will ‘work’. The packages aim to restore economic activity, that is throughput, to the levels of a year or two ago. They are intended to restore so-called ‘economic growth’, that is throughput-increase (see the post Concepts and Terms, early in the book) to those levels.

The stimulus is being applied by governments taking on more debt in order to fling vast sums of money at consumers to get them to buy more goods and services.

The Christian religion contains a paradox. It claims to be about love and life, while containing, in all its denominations and off-shoots, strong manifestations of death-orientation or necrophilia.

The term necrophilia is used in its broadest sense, defined thus: the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid; the passion to transform something alive into something unalive, and to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical or inanimate; the passion to tear apart living structures; the hatred of life, of its growth and development and its sources.

[Background to this letter: The 1988 edition of Economics for a Round Earth was purchased by the library of Murdoch University in Western Australia. Ms Tonti was featured in a 1993 story in 'The West Australian' newspaper, as one of the promising students of that year. I found her address and wrote to her, suggesting she find my book in the library and have a look at it if she had time. - Charles A. Pierce]

10/01/1994

Dear Mr Pierce,

Thankyou for your letter (March 1993) regarding your book “Economics for a Round Earth”, please accept my sincere apologies for responding so late to your letter.

In 1964, the ship Alkimos was wrecked on a reef off the coast of Western Australia at a time when our largest city, Perth’s, suburban sprawl had not reached that far. The ship was Greek but had a varied and colourful history, including on-board murders and criminal activity, under different names and flags. Attempts to salvage it failed and it was written off and left on the reef to break up. Over the years the wreck was visited by divers and adventurers, many of whom reported ghostly apparitions and experiences, and some of whom disappeared with their boats. The suburb eventually built on the nearby coast was called Alkimos.