Nicholas Gruen

A short interview with ABC news on what I think of the Changes to the Reserve Bank announced by Philip Lowe yesterday.

There's a spectre haunting ESG, the new trend towards investment funds seeking to consider things other than their financial bottom line. ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. But there's a problem. Often firms are not well placed to improve outcomes beyond their own immediate purview. Thus divestment from high-emissions firms might seem like a good idea, but it turns out to...

A couple of months ago I read and admired this article on Palladium, a new(ish) website that “explores the future of governance and society through international journalism, long-form analysis, and social philosophy”. It seemed that there was sufficient overlap between its concerns and mine that I asked if the author, Tanner Greer, would join me on the podcast. The essay begins with this assertion...

In this thought-provoking episode of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, Nicholas Gruen and guest Jarrod Wheatley, founder and CEO of PIC Professional Individualized Care, delve into the complex issue of risk in out-of-home care for children. As they explore the challenges faced by those involved in child protection, they discuss the delicate balance between prioritizing the child's well-be...

This is the second part of a great discussion I had with friend and colleague Gene Tunny on wellbeing agendas, how they go wrong and how transformative they could be. We begin by exploring what I call ‘top-down thinking’ — a style of strategising that was largely (and mercifully) absent from life fifty years ago.  That’s the style of thinking which begins with fine sounding apex statements — Missi...

In this interview with Leon Gettler I discuss why I think New Zealand's Wellbeing Budget was anything of the kind. It was a wellbeing themed budget, not one that will do much for wellbeing. I then discuss what it would look like if we really did want to embrace wellbeing. Will the Australian federal government manage to do better. We'll find out in the next year or so, but so far it seems...

Another great conversation with my friend, colleague and partner in podcasting crime Gene Tunny. Gene suggested we discuss various ways in which we've placed nationally independent analysis at the centre of government, only to find that it hasn't performed as well as it might. A classic example is regulatory impact statements, which were a good idea back when Australia was among the world&...

Every society evolves unique ways for people to live together happily and productively. But they change over time. Modernity has eclipsed these four ideas. Recovering them can make us happier and more productive. If I had four words to sum up where I've got to over the last couple of decades thinking how to improve the world, they'd be these. In discussing them with friend, philosopher and...

One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope who has just brought to publication a book written by his father in 1990. But being well ahead of its time, the book was unpublishable. It pursued Aristotle's point that elections installed a governing class and were therefore oligarchic. The institution that democracy represented the people was selection by lot as e...

I enjoyed this discussion with philosophy PhD and high school teacher from San Francisco's Bay area. I tried to articulate my own view that our understanding of science as the paradigm of all knowledge gets in the way of understanding important aspects of reality that science can't help us with. We talk about embodied cognition and various aspects of this essay . The video of our conversat...

I did this interview in the wake of the budget discussing what we could achieve if we took wellbeing seriously. Which no government I know of really has. And that includes Jacinta Ardern and her "Wellbeing" Budget.

This is the second part of a great discussion I had with friend and colleague Gene Tunny on wellbeing agendas, how they go wrong and how transformative they could be. We begin by exploring what I call ‘top-down thinking’ — a style of strategising that was largely (and mercifully) absent from life fifty years ago. That’s the style of thinking which begins with fine sounding apex statements — Missio...

I really enjoyed this week’s uncomfortable collision with reality with colleague Gene Tunny. We covered a lot of ground talking about the use and abuse of the wellbeing agenda. Where does it come from? Why is it taking off as an approach to policy making? How do we make the most of this as authorisation to improve our world? By avoiding the pitfalls! I argue that the main pitfall is imagining ours...

Colleague Gene Tunny and I discuss a means by which we could improve the impact of innovation programs as well as fight recessions and booms. And the cost? Nothing! If you'd like to watch the conversation, it's here on YouTube.

Poverty used to be the principal vector of oppression, but increasingly bureaucracy is integral to the story as anyone who's watched I, Daniel Blake will realise. Or way back in the 19th-century in Australia, at the Indigenous reserve at Corranderrk in Victoria as you can see here . In any event, it's alive and well in out of home care. You can watch the video if you prefer here .

This interview with Leon Gettler arose from these two Twitter discussions I had with various economists. They think only trained economists should be welcome on the RBA board. I wasn't so sure. And the more I thought about it, the less sure I was.

In this episode of uncomfortable collisions with reality, Peyton and I talk to Jonathan Hearn who has just published "The Domestication of Competition" a history of the way in which competition became increasingly significant through history. Increasingly competition came to be seen as a worthwhile way to distribute power, align interests and serve the common interest. This was true in p...

In this episode I speak with Jarrod Wheatley about how he took a model of out of home care from Germany and brought it to Australia, the obstacles he faced and the successes he's had with it. We swap notes, me from the perspective I've got in the gods thinking about how policy systems work from the offices of the central agencies, he from the work he does every day with the kids and their...

This is a podcast of a discussion between me and my friend Peyton Bowman about my essay "Democracy: forking the project". Here is the abstract of the essay.  Citizens’ juries — where a representative sample of citizens deliberate and decide on political issues — are increasingly popular. Representing constituents by sampling and deliberation rather than election and competition, they could de...

The shownotes from Economic Rockstar Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator. In this episode Professor Gruen discusses the need for reform in economics at both academic and policy level. He also explains the importance of information and how information is poorly managed at the central planning stage but can be used effec...

Here’s the first instalment of some podcasts I’m working on with my friend Peyton Bowman. In previous discussions, we spent a fair bit of time exploring the way, by being so different to our own, the ancient world gives us insights into our current state. Anyway, we have gone one better, inviting classics scholar of note Josiah Ober to discuss aspects of his latest book with us. In previous discus...

In this conversation with Leon Gettler I talk about the ways we could select people on merit in a bottom-up way which dispensed with the invidiousness of competition. This kind of thing was actually prominent in the minds of the American founding fathers way back when. We should return to their concern with some of the downsides of too much competition in choosing out leaders. 

You know how those on the left are pilloried for not standing up during Stalin's show trials in the 1930. When the tanks rolled into Prague in 1958 or to Hungary a decade later? Well they should be piloried for it. And now the toxicity of the right has spun out of control, still most people on the right aren't too fussed. The toxic candidates might not be their cup of tea, but hey you can't make a...

I explore a way I've come to think about society with my friend Peyton Bowman and represent in a diagram which is the first slide in these slides. ( Here is the pptx, and here is the pdf.) (Note only the first two slides were used in this talk).  The diagram illustrates the principles which should characterise communication within any kind of community — in which I include organisations like...

How much should we defer to expertise, and how do we know who’s an expert and who’s not? How does ‘the system’ know that? How did Kaggle revolutionise not just the way data science was done, but how we recognise expertise in data science. And why does weather forecasting offer the epitome of what I call ‘Socratic expertise’?   As usual, this was a wide-ranging and exciting conversation with m...