Nicholas Gruen

Interviewed on my videos by Peter Clarke of The Transit Zone , you'll find this interview is in a new register, more appropriate to our dire situation. Asked what I thought of democracy I riffed off Lincoln's idea that it was "the last best hope of earth". And off an idea I expressed a few years ago - in a post titled " Will you join me in the alt-centre ". I argued tha...

Ryan Faulkner-Hogg asked me to join him on his long-form podcast show where, over nearly three hours, we spoke about many things. Here are his show notes: I joined the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen recently in his Melbourne home to host his first 'long-form' podcast (although I'm not sure at what hour it goes from short to long) At the core of Gruen's worldview is the “un-ser...

In this final talk at Web Directions NEXT, I explore how we might breathe new life into democracy—by giving ordinary people a permanent seat at the table. The idea is to establish a House of Citizens—a standing assembly of everyday people, chosen by lottery, deliberating on the same laws and policies as parliament or congress. No formal power at first. Just visibility to the public who get to see...

In the second of three talks at John Allsopp’s Web Directions Dec 2024 NEXT conference, I dig into a question modern life has taught us to overlook: how do we decide what's truly good? We’ve built a civilisation where merit is often confused with ambition, where leadership is predicated on self-promotion, and where institutions reward ambition and playing the game (instead of service) and ‘sma...

In this freewheeling conversation with John Humphreys and Gene Tunny, we delve into what’s gone wrong with modern policymaking—and what can be done about it. We begin with the dysfunctional state of our tax system. I argue we should scrap dividend imputation and cut the company tax rate to attract foreign capital and grow the national pie. We then explore the systemic malaise of democracy: how spi...

This is the first of three talks I gave to John Allsopp's Web Directions NEXT conference held in Sydney in late 2024. The three talks introduce a new project of mine - a series of short videos called Awakening our better angels. It’s about our institutions—how they shape our behaviour, our politics, and our civilisation. How they can bring out the worst in us—or the best. And how modern institutio...

As readers may know, in contrast to most folks promoting citizen assemblies, I am not too optimistic that running temporary, special purpose citizen assemblies will achieve much. They come and go, serve up some recommendations to the government and then become ‘issues management’ fodder, and in so doing rehearse the role of the people as supplicants to their government. I think we need to develop...

From Alex's blurb Together, we examine how the internet’s kerosene amplifies wish-casting, why monarchic fantasies seduce tech elites, and what bottom-up meritocracy - citizen juries, sortition, and ‘small-scale hacks’ - might offer a polity that feels increasingly unmoored. We grapple with Burnham, Yarvin, and the uneasy marriage between markets, monopolies, and truth-telling institutions, as...

Rory Sutherland suggested that the host of Simplifying Complexity have me on his podcast a while back. In that interview, I was critical of those who peddle ‘complexity’ as a new paradigm in economics. It's not. It's a bunch of new models. But the idea of 'complexity' as some new lens really runs rampant in numerous discourses around society and, for instance, new approaches to social disadvantage...

An interview that took place with me at 5.20 on the 1st April 2025 on the release of the Tasmanian Planning Commission draft integrated assessment report.

I discuss Trump's tariffs with Leon Gettler, how economists aren't telling the whole truth about those Tariffs. Trump is wrong when he says foreigners will pay them. But he's not all wrong.

I talk to Leon Gettler about the way electoral funding is manipulated by the major parties to entrench their own power. Democracy is supposed to be a competition, not a rigged game, yet we see politicians making decisions that serve their own interests rather than the public good. I argue that it's absurd to have politicians determining the terms of political competition — they should have no...

In this after-dinner talk to the Radix conference on Resilient Democracy at St George's House on Feb 20th, I lay out a different way of thinking about democracy — one that challenges the assumption that elections are the only legitimate form of representation. Democracies mix two approaches: representation by election and representation by sampling. But in modern politics, we’ve sidelined the latt...

In this discussion, Gene Tunny and I discuss my leading article in my Substack last week. There I agued that our political systems are built on representing people through elections whereas there’s another way to represent the people — by sampling. We can create bodies that are representative of the people because they’re chosen by lottery from the people. And here’s the thing. The systems built o...

An interview with me on Victoria's 3AW Wide World of Sports

An interview with ABC Hobart on the release of my report on the Hobart Stadium which you can download from this link: https://tinyurl.com/GruenReport

I joined Peter Clarke and Margo Kingston on their Transitzone podcast. Here's their own description of our discussion. _________________________________________________ This last week of the election campaign has seen Donald Trump become even more overheated in his rhetoric. His fixation on whether Kamala Harris had a summer job working for McDonalds about 40 years ago, as she claims, has become a...

Here I discuss a speech made by Andrew Hauser, Deputy Governor of the RBA on how little forecasters know and how much humbler we should all be. I focus on what he didn't say, which is that the best way to tackle hubris and improve forecasting is to run open forecasting tournaments. Only then can you access 'superforecasters' — those people made famous by Philip Tetlock's bestsellin...

Me and Leon Gettler discuss share our disappointment and dismay that no-one is being held accountable for the disgrace of RoboDebt and talk about unaccountability more generally.

Do we need a ‘new paradigm’ in economics? Mostly, our problems are more mundane than that. They stem from slavishly using our frameworks, and applying them as if they give us most of the answer. I think they're just a starting point, a set of clues about one way to structure one's thinking. In economics they also offer a means of adding things up into a total picture — subtracting costs fr...

I discuss the recent Tasmanian election and have the cheek to suggest that the Jacqi Lambie Network might have been the most serious political party on offer. We talk about the role a standing citizen assembly could play in settling down politics as usual, how it might help the politicians get back to their intended job — which is solving problems — rather than the job electoral politics tends to...

In this discussion with Leon Gettler I talk about the ways in which ESG (the widening of investment mandates to take into account issues to do with the Environment, Social and Governance) can be dysfunctional. For instance policies to only invest in low emissions firms are unlikely to do much good and may do harm (by starving emissions-intensive businesses with investment funds which will generall...

I spoke with Steve Austin a few months ago about wellbeing frameworks and what they can (and can't) do to improve our world. So he got back in touch with me to ask what I thought of the Federal Government's recently released wellbeing framework.

Of all the podcasts we’ve done so far, this is my favourite. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion” . It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire, via Emperor Constantine’s conversion. Heather’s book shows how much Christianity was spread not by those ‘meek’ whom Jesus would have inherit the earth, but by...