Nicholas Gruen

This was a great conversation with a friend of mine Sam Roggeveen in which Sam solves the dilemma of how to get to a republic once and for all!  Sam argues we're mistaking decline in the party system for the decline of democracy.  I think the foundations of democracy have been under attack for a generation or more. We both agree that social media has accelerated the decline.   ...

I enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman and our guest James D'Angelo who has campaigned for greater secrecy in the committee stages of Congress . Why would he do that? Surely we need more, not less transparency? Turns out too much could be strangling our democracy. It’s strangling his country’s response to gun violence.  It strangled Australia’s capacity to deal with climate...

I enjoyed this conversation with Peyton Bowman .   Can you remember the names of any Swiss Prime Ministers? Peyton couldn’t. I couldn’t, and neither, I’m guessing, can you.? The answer is a few minutes in.  More generally, what do we get and what do we lose from politics being as entertaining as it is? And why are some of the most dysfunctional social institutions of ours highly the...

Harry Corbett, founder and mover and shaker behind the Intelligence Forum (https://www.intelligence-forums.com/) wrote me a letter (!) mentioning that, on account of encountering me on the net, he would like me to talk to his forum. I suggested that my ideas on democracy would be appropriate and so that's what I talked about. So … for anyone who wants to hear a 25 minute summary of my views and/or...

Peyton and I recorded this discussion last week with my friend Isabella Perez. It arose from my own dissatisfaction with much of the commentary I was reading. Everyone seemed preoccupied with whose side you should be on and what it all meant for #MeToo. These are of course legitimate questions, but then the commentators’ ideological preferences were no secret, nor was the way the case could be ‘sp...

A discussion with Leon Gettler on the election of the Albanese Government. I reprise the arguments I set in this essay which I wrote in 2008 just after Kevin Rudd had been elected for government by coalition-building and compromise around solving national problems rather than by divide and rule. The success of the independents in this election means it's very much in Labor's interest to revive tha...

In my essay recently published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) I outlined a strategy by which people imagine they’re doing economics, by sounding like an economist with all their talk of trade-offs. But they’re really engaged in a kind of pretend thinking. I call it ‘theorisation’ by analogy with ‘ strategisation ’ — a term I coined a while back to refer to those portentous ways...

Delivered to the Communities in Control conference in 2020  Why is it that new agendas in policy arrive, hold the stage for a few years and, when they are swept away by the next fad, have next to nothing to show for themselves?  New Zealand has garnered world attention for its ‘Wellbeing Budget’.  But Australia’s Treasury had a wellbeing framework a decade ago. It was quietly scrapp...

I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside knowledge of Australia's electoral system into a feature rather than a bug as I used the conversation to explain to him (and to myself!) the significance I saw in the r...

This discussion with David Thunder arose from my criticism of his embrace of free speech in response to his being thrown off Twitter . As I explained, I sympathised with what had happened to him. Twitter had no business throwing off someone who was clearly in good faith and seeking to debate substantial issues in a reality-based way. But as we discuss, I still thought that the issues are far from...

In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in the same way that McDonalds and KFC optimise their food with salt, sugar and fat to attract sales. We also discuss other areas characterised by fast-foodification. &nb...

An interview with Tyson Yunkaporta on wellbeing.  The idea of targeting government policy on wellbeing is a great opportunity to do things differently and better. Alas the way we're doing it, wellbeing means little and its presence in policy is rather like the theme at a ball. The New Zealand government tells us that it's targetting wellbeing in its budget, but if you look closely it's doing...

I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman and I explore this tantalising suggestion in Elinor Ostrom’s speech accepting the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:      Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals      to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analy...

In this conversation, Peyton Bowman and I complete the elaboration of what I’ve suggested are the four principles of a flourishing society. We do so via an extension of the economists’ notion of the complementarity of public and private goods. For economists, those goods you buy in the market are private goods. Competition is also a good thing in ensuring those private goods are the best they can...

What's your vision for success as a start-up entrepreneur. Would you rather be Mark Zuckerberg worth tens of billions of dollars or Muhammad Yunus whose development of micro-credit in poor countries has lifted millions from poverty? (Oh and he'll never want for money as he won the Nobel Peace Prize and can pick up $75,000 for a speech ). Of course, he could want for more, owning billions instead o...

This was a second discussion of my framework of four principles needed for a healthy organisation or political system. We began the discussion considering Elon Musk's recent complaint about censorship on social media. We reprised the basic principles we discussed last week and showed how they helped us understand Musk’s claim and why any ‘free speech’ alternative to existing dominant social media...

I explore a way I've come to think about society with my friend Peyton Bowman (https://www.protoclassic.com/paying-attention/) and represent in a diagram which is the first slide in these slides. ( pptx , 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 inclu...

In this video Peyton Bowman and I explore aspects of my blog post " Will you join me in the alt-centre? ". I initially coined the term “alt-centre” light-heartedly, but, like many such things, having put it up there, I think it might be about something real.  An earlier iteration of my centrism is here .  But that was then.  Now I’d say, how about a fusion of Alasdair MacIntyre, Jam...

A quick browse of the self-help section of your local bookstore will show you that Stoicism has become popular in the last decade or so with a strong surge during the pandemic. Peyton Bowman and I discuss this phenomenon alongside of my own interest in the ethics of the ancient world and my dissatisfaction with contemporary moral systems — something I discussed in this essay which we discuss. Peyt...

From 2GB's website Luke Grants chats to Dr Nicholas Gruen, the CEO of Lateral Economics, who argues that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is playing the role Winston Churchill played in 1940.  In a world bathed in BS, Zelenskyy’s physical courage actually makes a greater contribution today than it did in Churchill’s time. He says Zelinsky cuts through the BS, he means what he says and it...

Another great discussion with my friend Peyton Bowman . We began with a passage from William James on faith. Though the essay does discuss religious faith, it starts more mundanely, speaking of the way faith makes community life possible by knitting people together in bonds of mutual rights and obligations.  One implication is that social life is necessarily a network phenomenon. Further...

Joe Trippi was the campaign manager who first worked out how to use the internet in campaigning. I met him about a decade ago and was fascinated with his campaigning exploits — including taking Howard Dean from backmarker to presidential frontrunner in 2004. Many of the architects of the online campaigning that took Obama to the White House came from the Dean campaign that Joe engineered.  &n...

From 2GB's website: Luke Grant is joined by Dr Nicholas Gruen, Lateral Economics’ CEO & Index author and a thinker who doesn’t mind challenging the norms and we love that on this programme. Most people would say those who occupy seats in our various parliaments and councils are not always seen as being in touch with us ordinary folk or even worse, not always putting our best interest...

I really enjoyed this conversation with Peyton Bowman (https://www.protoclassic.com/paying-attention/). We were both quite taken with how much the simple story of Mal Meninga's famous 30-second political career had resonated with us and with our audience. It turned out that the story prompted quite a bit of further thought which was worth taking further. So we did.    Meninga's poli...

Tyson Yunkaporta was greatly taken with the story of Mal Meninga's thirty-second political career , ending when he realised he couldn't go through the falsity, bullshit and self-importance of campaigning. I mentioned this in my weekly newsletter when I was contacted by someone in Ohio who had a similar revulsion of political business-as-usual but who is hoping to parlay that into a campaign for a...