Amnon Levy is a PhD holder from the University of California at Berkeley and a University of Wollongong Professor of Economics. In addition to efficiency and sustainability, he has focused on fairness in the allocations of opportunities and on investments in human capital, health, and communication as instruments for social mobility, integration, wellbeing and peace. He spent the first forty years of his life in the disputed, violently contested, ethnically fragmented and environmentally degraded “Holy Land” and served as a tenured Senior Lecturer in Economics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In 1990, he moved to live in “The Dreamland” of the Aboriginal peoples, “The Lucky Country Down Under” of the white convicts and fresh-start seekers and “The Hard Yakka Land” of the yellow, brown and black refugees and skilled-labour immigrants.
The first four decades of my life were spent in a small country that was nested in a hostile and unstable old region, Israel. I strongly felt, enjoyed, and participated in, the revival of that country and experienced the uneasy reintegration of the returning descendants of Abraham, Issac and Jacob f...