Nicholas Gruen
By Nicholas Gruen
Nicholas GruenJun 11, 2022
Economics: is complexity the answer?
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 from benefits. Beyond that, one of the main messages of complexity science should be how we need to start from an appreciation of how little we know and how hard it is to know more.
Yes, there are some areas where different approaches can be helpful — or more helpful than the frameworks dominant today — for instance, in finance. But mostly, it’s a matter of using the resources we have as best we can and not imagining they’re more powerful than they are.
Me, Margo Kingston and Peter Clarke on the Transit Zone
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 force them into — which is creating them. And we offer some thoughts about an orange haired clear and present danger to the world.
Fessing up to the fudges in ESG
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 generally be necessary for them to reduce their emissions intensity).
I argue that investment funds should share these dilemmas with those they invest for and involve them in a process for considering the issues and deciding on an acceptable way to resolve them. How should they do it? With a jury — selected to be representative of all those they invest for.
Chatting with Steve Austin about the Government's Wellbeing Framework
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.
Elite Capture: Christianity Wrote the Playbook!
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 the powerful for whom conversion offered improved relations with the Emperor’s court. Over time, and through the period of Charlemagne it infiltrated European life via various drives for Christian piety.
By the 12th century, the Church had deeply infiltrated people’s lives through the seven sacraments — which marked the weekly rhythms and major milestones of people’s lives — they included baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, and marriage. And by the 12th century, the church was in many ways more powerful than any king or emperor. It controlled Europe’s operating system — it’s systems of information and learning and its transnational legal code. The church is also the template for a specific organisational form. The church was a unitary organisation governed by a monarch supported by a skilled bureaucracy administering an elaborate and time-honoured legal code. Nation states took their form from the church. So too, later on did corporations.
If you prefer watching the video, you can find it here.
Changes to the RBA
A short interview with ABC news on what I think of the Changes to the Reserve Bank announced by Philip Lowe yesterday.
Why ESG is a puppet show
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 have minimal impact on emissions. This is as one might expect because it simply passes the invest onto investors who don't care about the issue.
In fact there's a more powerful reason which is that starving emissions-intensive firms of funds is likely to depress their investment which they need to reduce emissions. And since the 20% of firms with the highest emissions emit 280 times what the least emitting 20% firms emit, reducing the emissions of the high-emissions firms is very likely to be where the biggest climate change action is going to be. These are genuine dilemmas but investment firms who seek to target ESG tend not to level with their retail investors that this is what is going on. They're much more likely to do their best and then 'sell' their members some calming PR on how their investments are making a difference. We talk about a left field way round this dilemma.
If you'd like to see the video of this discussion you can find it here.
How did we get from "How Can I Help" to "How Can Govt Help Me?
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: The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”
It then elaborates and explores with examples, speculates on the causes of the change and discusses the means by which we might get back to a healthier situation. Greer argues that the 19th-century institutions combined three characteristics: the aspirational ideal of public brotherhood, a commitment to formality and discipline in self-government, and organizational structures that combined decentralization with hierarchy.
I hope you enjoy the discussion.
If you’d rather watch the episode, it is here.
Risk: protecting the children or protecting the system? CEO on Disadvantaged youth
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-being and managing organizational risk. Drawing parallels to the institutional imperative and transparent decision-making, this episode sheds light on the need for thoughtful consideration and empathy when navigating the intricacies of the out-of-home care system.
0:55 Introduction 1:23 How the system humiliates 4:07 Prioritizing the best interests of the child 7:42 How the system prioritizes its own preservation, more than the children 9:56 Risks surrounding out-of-home care 13:30 It's the interests of the kids we're after 16:45 How would you act if they were your niece or nephew? 20:10 Bernie's advice 22:35 Practical examples 25:54 The role of communication
If you prefer to watch this, the video is here.
Promoting Wellbeing or Anti-thinking?
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 — Mission, vision and values statements — and then builds plans and priorities by ‘drilling down’ from such statements.
Wellbeing agendas too are tied up in pleasant-sounding objectives. However they pass over many of the important questions. They relate firstly to how trade-offs are made and secondly to how we'll acquire the knowhow to get what we're after. Planning from the top rarely addresses such questions.
This doesn't just mean we won't make much progress. It can actively undermine progress, as for instance when central planners insist that the measures by which projects will be assessed must be consistent across projects. Such stipulations sound like the soul of reasonableness. But quite obviously they dictate to those running programs in the field the way they’ll be measured. And this prevents such projects from developing their own monitoring and evaluation focused on their needs to understand what they’re doing and how they can improve. If you'd prefer to watch the video, it's here.
What a wellbeing budget would look like: Hint, not like Jacinta's budgets
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 to be heading down the New Zealand route.
The $100B lying on the pavement
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's leaders in introducing them in 1986.
However, they've not had much impact because although notionally independent, government rewards 'can do' types both at the political and bureaucratic level. So the process degrades into a box-ticking process. Something similar happens with freedom of information as bureaucrats delay and resist release in various ways and the important stuff migrates into whispered conversations in corridors and secure and self-erasing platforms like Signal. And then there's independent assessment of infrastructure.
The new ALP Government has cleaned things up a little, but could go a lot further as independent Allegra Spender suggested in this intervention. But the two major parties wouldn't have it. Ultimately this takes us to the question of how firmly democratic principles are anchored in Western Democracies. They're under threat everywhere. Yet there's a simple, radical and democratic way to secure them. Build the institutions in which the people can defend them!
If you'd like to watch the discussion the video is here.
Four ways to fix 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 school teacher Martin Turkis, I gave myself the challenge of writing them out in a summary form for him to present to his high school students. This has got to be a better test of their value than whether they can be published in a learned journal.
If you'd like to check out the video, it's here:
2:13 Part 1 - Four Principles 2:54 Isegoria 6:03 Parrhesia 9:23 Fidelity 18:25 Merit 25:58 Part 2 - Question and Answer 29:14 De-Competitive Representation 1:12:53 Hate Speech
Engines of Oligarchy: with Hugh Pope
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 embodied today in legal juries. If you'd rather watch the video, it's here. 1:52 Background 5:46 Aristotle's View on Elections 9:47 How Jury Service Could Work 13:06 How elections make us vulnerable to authoritarians 29:49 Bringing the shy people out 39:13 The pathway to a better system. 46:07 Sortition in Florence, Italy
Science: How it obscures reality
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 conversation is here.
Talking with the ABC's Steve Austin about wellbeing.
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.
Promoting Wellbeing or Anti-thinking?
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 — Mission, vision and values statements — and then builds plans and priorities by ‘drilling down’ from such statements.
Wellbeing agendas too are tied up in pleasant-sounding objectives. However they pass over many of the important questions. They relate firstly to how trade-offs are made and secondly to how we'll acquire the knowhow to get what we're after. Planning from the top rarely addresses such questions.
This doesn't just mean we won't make much progress. It can actively undermine progress, as for instance when central planners insist that the measures by which projects will be assessed must be consistent across projects. Such stipulations sound like the soul of reasonableness. But quite obviously they dictate to those running programs in the field the way they’ll be measured. And this prevents such projects from developing their own monitoring and evaluation focused on their needs to understand what they’re doing and how they can improve. If you'd prefer to watch the video, it's here.
Wellbeing: escaping the iron law of business-as-usual
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 ourselves to be part of some grand new way of thinking. Bureaucrats and think tanks reach for frameworks and schematic diagrams.
But if they’re the wrong kinds — if they’re schematic rather than built to aid action — those frameworks simply give us new labels with which to dress up the same old same old and the iron law of business-as-usual takes hold again. Until the next new fad, the next new vocabulary.
However, done well, we could really address some big problems at the same time as improving the health and prosperity of our communities. You can find the audio file here. Here's the link to the video of our discussion.
Walking while chewing gum: Spurring innovation and fighting recession
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.
Bureaucracy as oppression: The case of out of home care
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.
Who belongs on the RBA board?
How we all became competitors
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 politics as modern electoral democracy developed, in science, in business and of course in sport. And as competition grew in significance, more attention was paid attending to building the institutions necessary to both compete and to govern competition for the common good. In this discussion we discuss his book and also explore differences in his own approach to these things as an historian, anthropologist and sociologist and my own. I'm particularly interested in the ways we could shape competition to improve its functioning in the social interest. If you'd like to watch the conversation, the video is here.
Uncomfortable collisions with reality: Jarrod Wheatley on saving abused and neglected kids
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 carers. If you prefer to watch the discussion, you can find the video here.
Democracy: forking the project
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 deepen existing democracies as a check and balance to existing institutions. But the public understands their potential poorly because most juries have been one-off, single-issue exercises held by (and so, for) existing institutions.
With governance arrangements keeping funders at arm's length, progress could begin with a philanthropically and crowd-funded standing citizens' jury. Without any formal power, such a “People’s Council” could nevertheless shadow other houses of parliament/congress’s decisions and pass resolutions of its own. Had such a body existed, it would have been:
- Harder to abolish carbon pricing in Australia,
- Harder to negotiate such a ‘hard’ and damaging Brexit in the UK,
- Harder to demonise nuclear energy in fighting climate change,
- Easier for the US Senate to convict President Trump for inciting insurrection.
Greater attention would have been given ‘bread and butter’ issues like health, aged care and education and less to ‘hot button’ issues like immigration and crime. And those latter issues would have been addressed in ways that were more consensual and informed by the evidence. So policy would have been more effective.
Even without formal, constitutional power, where it disagreed with public votes taken on the floor of a house, it could call for an additional secret ballot, thus bidding for more influence and modelling the role it would have as a check and balance — in an officially constituted ‘people’s branch’ of government.
To develop its own capabilities and autonomy, the people’s branch must establish its own internal governance and leadership structures. To ensure their consistency with the egalitarian spirit of sortition and to minimise its capture by the self-assertive, charismatic and power-hungry, I suggest eschewing direct competition for office. The brevia is one such mechanism. It minimised factionalism and set the stage for 500 years of stability in Venice. It involves randomly selecting some ‘electors’ from the council and getting them to identify those most worthy of internal leadership roles. A ‘council of elders’ of past participants of citizens’ juries could be chosen by such means to act as a source of advice and support to current juries and as a repository of corporate memory and evolving traditions.
If the people’s branch were developed along these lines, it would become an ideal ‘honest broker’ to preserve the basic norms of procedural fairness on which peaceful government is founded. This is already happening in some jurisdictions — for instance, with a people’s council with the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. However, over time the people’s branch could expand to be given a substantial role in the appointment of judges and officials. America’s founding fathers attempted to constitutionally entrench such procedural norms into the US constitution via Senate confirmations, but that mechanism is now under partisan siege.
NG on Economic Rockstar
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 effectively under the right direction if this information or data can be shareable both from the private and the public sector
Should we just suit ourselves?
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 discussions with him, it struck me that some of the ideas he’d been working on regarding the Greeks offered a simple typology with which we can understand the modern concept of enlightened self-interest. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, I guess you’d better check out the chat. It’s only 20 minutes and we’re planning to follow up with more. The video is at this link.
Getting the best without competition
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.
Where did you stand when the right went toxic?
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 an omlette without breaking eggs.
My recent interview with Leon Gettler.
Four foundational principles for a flourishing organisation or society: Part One
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 a firm or something larger like a national polity. Isegoria — or equality of speech — is a 'horizontal' value — calling for everyone to be heard no matter their status in society. But, the ‘vertical’ concept of parrhēsia is also absent. “Parrhēsia’ is usually translated as 'freedom of speech', but it’s a richer idea infused with mutual ethical obligation. It is the importance of speaking truth to power, but it also entails the powerful's duty to listen to what they're being told.
In our society those lower down are mostly expected to flatter those above, and so they 'gild the lily', and tell the kinds of stories the powerful want to be told. The result is lies all the way up the line. We explore these ideas in the classroom and then in organisations. I use the example of Toyota which shows how empowering those on the line is an astoundingly more productive way to make cars efficiently than having people directed by, and fearful of, those above. There are two other orders within which we explore these ideas. Throughout the discussion, we refer back to political life, and towards the end we also talk about science, which also enables us to discuss an additional concept in the diagram, the notion of fidelity. That leaves a fourth principle ‘merit’ to be explained in a future discussion! Part Two of this discussion is here.
Amateurs or experts: who should you trust?
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 my friend Peyton Bowman.
You can find the video here.
The republic: a way forward (and plenty of other things)
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. What’s going on in the US is a crucial test for Sam's case.
We both think that citizens’ juries and similar institutions have a lot to offer.
Then Sam comes up with a novel solution to the republican dilemma! Allow the people to choose the president but rather than an election for the president, have them selected by a citizens’ assembly.
We then offer our advice to the government and to the independents. The video can be seen here.
Transparency: It's role in strangling democracy
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 change. And it brought about Brexit against the better judgement of — say — four fifths of the British Parliament. It’s a good discussion though it takes a while to get going. Start at the beginning if you wish, but I’ve set the link above about ten minutes in where we start getting down to it. From there it just gets interestinger and interestinger as Lewis Carroll might have said.
The YouTube video is available here.
Should politics be boring?
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 theatrical — like politics and court cases? What’s driving all the dysfunction and what tweaks could be made to improve the situation? We explore these issues, and go on a couple of interesting diversions — Around ‘ground-truthing’ in arguments and the way gender plays out in the recognition of expertise. Also available as a video here.
Once more on democracy
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 listen to an excellent question and answer session lasting nearly twice as long, here's the video.
The video — which can be useful in identifying speakers in the Q&A — can be watched here.
The right to be Heard: Red, green or Amber?
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 ‘spun’. If a woman is unanimously held by a jury to be lying about domestic violence, then that will set back a movement if one of its slogans is ‘always believe women’. Anyway, have a listen and let us know what you thought of what we made of it all. If you prefer video, the YouTube video is here.
Internalise and compromise or divide and rule: a chat with Leon Gettler
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 that model of governance.
Idols of the modern mind: stragisation, thematisation and theorisation
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 in which some worthy words are launched upon the world with bold protestations of how they are uniquely suited to current circumstances. We are assured that this thing that’s being said (say the need for wage restraint, or more competition) has ‘never been more important when in fact it’s often been more important. They’re just thoughtful sounding words, but embodying the opposite of thought.
Anyway, this led to my writing up these ideas as idols of the modern mind and to this discussion with Peyton. If you’d like to read the essay, drop me a line on ngruen at gmail I’ll send you access to the full draft essay.
The Iron law of business-as-usual: What is it and can we escape it?
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 scrapped a few years ago and no one noticed the difference. It looks like New Zealand is heading down a similar path. Likewise, governments around the world — including Australia’s — pitch the idea that NGOs will innovate and governments will fund the successful programs so they can scale. But it almost never happens.
That’s because there’s a catch 22 for would-be innovators, unacknowledged even by those who’d like to help them. In this talk, Nicholas Gruen explains the problem and how we can overcome it.
Here's a link to the video of the presentation — together with slides shown during the presentation.
Include and compromise — don’t divide and conquer: Tendrils of Hope from Australia.
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 recent election of a new Labor Government.
I think Australian culture and two specific features of our electoral system make it easier for our politicians to govern from the centre. Now the triumph of a number of independents from the wealthier, previously conservative voting suburbs of Australia’s big cities has swung the pendulum back towards the centre and opened up new opportunities, not just for the country, but for each of us.
And I explain my own plans for making a small contribution to a new and better Australia. The video of the same discussion is here.
Could social media drive better civic conversation?
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 straightforward. The audio of this discussion can be found here.
The video is here.
Fast foodification: what is it, what's driving it, how do we stop it?
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. And we look at the question of what psychologists call ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ preferences — namely what we want as compared with what we want to want. Growing as people involves a process of schooling tastes to acquire better ones. We might want to get fit, find going to the gym a chore for a while as we get used to it, but once we’re habituated to it we don’t want to miss our session.
Many things in human flourishing are like this as we school ourselves and habituate ourselves to better tastes and better behaviour. Finally, having both agreed that capitalism and competition for votes tends to reinforce primary preferences — we discuss what institutions might encourage a culture in which secondary preferences might be nurtured. The video is available here.
Death by wellbeing
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 nothing of the kind. It tells us that its wellbeing budget has five 'themes' or priorities, but where did they come from. Did the literature or any other serious endeavour determine that. Not a bit of it. It was government spin. Some of the themes seem likely to correlate with wellbeing, but the wellbeing impacts of the new policy is not measured so we won't know how much they contribute to wellbeing. Others — like innovation — are a simple rebadging. They'd be in a non-wellbeing themed budget. You can also watch the interview here. (https://youtu.be/ra4OFTl4lb8)
Building institutions for human flourishing
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 analysts
for much of the past half-century. Extensive empirical research leads me to
argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the
development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.
We explore various ways in which the world we’ve built following the first strategy predicated on people’s self-interestedness has undermined the better angels of our nature. And we explore the institutions we might build to embrace the second strategy — to build the institutions of human flourishing.
Without suggesting we can set the clock back, we look at what we’ve lost in amateur and community based sport as sport has become more professionalised and commercialised.
We then discuss various ways in which people put boundaries around competition — for instance with rules against conflict of interest.
And we look at something I think is a big deal. I call them “de-competitive” institutions. These involve mechanisms of selection which are not competitive. This is particularly interesting where merit is selected without competition between the population from whom the most meritorious are selected.
We conclude with a quick look at something we'll explore later in greater depth. Hyper-competition produces ‘fast-foodification’ — a process whereby competitive strategies frustrate the development of better habits of mind and body.
Though there are a few slides, you'll be able to easily follow along without looking at them. If you'd like to see them, they're here. The video can be seen here.
The public goods of the 21st-century
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 be. But we also need public goods — which are goods markets won’t provide. In this schema, cars are private goods and roads are public goods.
But where economists apply this idea to goods, in this conversation we explore how they can be extended to social institutions. A line to get onto a bus, a game of tennis — even a conversation — are all what I call ‘ecologies’ of public and private goods. And that gives us a key to what’s gone wrong in our world. Because more and more the ecology of our institutions is becoming unbalanced and unhealthy, as what should be shared is colonised by powerful special interests.
The video is here.
Mark Zuckerberg or Muhammad Yunus?
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 of millions, but how much extra satisfaction would it buy him?
This is the way I crystalised a choice lots of modern start-ups need to make, and certainly, one that the company I've invested in — Speedlancer — may find itself making. Because any builder of a platform is a builder of a public good. And one can build it to maximise profit or one can build it to maximise the value it creates. But here's the thing. Because of the extraordinary productivity of platforms, certainly early on in their lives, the most successful platforms are often the ones that focus most on maxing out the value they create with monetising that value thought of as the next stage of the plan. As Paul Graham suggests the first, hardest problem is to build something great. He argues that that's why so many of the most successful start ups look like not for profits for the early part of their existence — they're just focused on their customers, their suppliers, their tech and how it all fits together. That's hard.
Anyway, that's my vision for Speedlancer. I can't say it's official policy, but it's how I think it might change the world. So enjoy the interview, which was conducted for Speedlancer to give me an opportunity to convey these ideas. And if you want to watch the video of the interview, it's here.
Four foundational principles for a flourishing organisation or society: Part Two
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 platforms is likely to run into similar dilemmas to them — even if it can get enough subscribers to become a force. I also refer to my comments on this post which elaborate these ideas further.
I also explain the fourth principle in the framework — merit — using the example of Wikipedia and open-source software. While we're in love with how 'democratic' and open these production methods are, while this is beneficial, the real 'secret sauce' of these extraordinary new production methods is not their radical openness and connectedness but that they have found a new and very effective way of building meritocracies. Anyone can contribute and, by doing so can work their way into a position of greater respect, standing and authority. If this was not in place, opening up their production process to all comers would lead to chaos, not the miracles to which it has. If you prefer the video, you can find it here.
What are we missing? Foundational principles from the deep
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 include organisations like a firm or something larger like a national polity.
Isegoria — or equality of speech — is a 'horizontal' value — calling for everyone to be heard no matter their status in society. But, the ‘vertical’ concept of parrhēsia is also absent. “Parrhēsia’ is usually translated as 'freedom of speech', but it’s a richer idea infused with mutual ethical obligation. It is the importance of speaking truth to power, but it also entails the powerful's duty to listen to what they're being told. In our society those lower down are mostly expected to flatter those above, and so they 'gild the lily', and tell the kinds of stories the powerful want to be told. The result is lies all the way up the line.
We explore these ideas in the classroom and then in organisations. I use the example of Toyota which shows how empowering those on the line is an astoundingly more productive way to make cars efficiently than having people directed by, and fearful of, those above. There are two other orders within which we explore these ideas. Throughout the discussion, we refer back to political life, and towards the end we also talk about science, which also enables us to discuss an additional concept in the diagram, the notion of fidelity. That leaves a fourth principle ‘merit’ to be explained in a future discussion!
Will you join me in the alt-centre?
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, James Burnham and George Orwell together with the idea that outputs from modern academia are mostly useless?
And, in this discussion, as I do in my post, we explore James Burnham's argument that over nine-tenths of political discussion — from the heights of political theory right down to discussions in the street is fatally infected with wish fulfilment, rather than a proper engagement with the problems of the world and what we can practically do about them.
I illustrate this by referring to the much relied on the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome noting that neither actually exists in the world. They're abstractions. More to the point, if you give one generation equality of opportunity, its children will not have equality of opportunity because the children of people who've not done well will start disadvantaged. And yet the concept is bandied about in political discussion as if it were far more determinative than it is.
We go on to discuss a range of questions such as the role that our values — and our wishes — should play in political discussion and the way in which various practices associated with wokedom, often have more to do with organisations protecting themselves from risk than they do with helping address difficult issues. As such, when organisations regulate conduct to take these ideas into account, they often do so to make them disappear rather than to engage with them. These ideas are explored further in this blog post.
How come stoicism is suddenly a thing?
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.
Peyton suggests that Stoicism is appealing because it speaks to our need to take what ends we're required to achieve in our jobs and our life and to make the most of our situation. Modern Stoicism seems to emphasize what’s sometimes called the dichotomy of control, an idea traced back to the 1st-2nd century philosopher, Epictetus.
People, he believed, can’t be held responsible for things beyond their control — it’s essentially pointless, then, to worry about anything except that which one can control. In the modern context, Peyton contends that this makes the philosophy extremely compatible with people inside organizations or bureaucracies which dictate the ends to which people's work will be directed — those people being the means of achieving those given ends. Of course, as a system of ethics, modern Stoicism is not blind to the worth or otherwise of our labour — and has its own ideas about how virtue works in the modern world — but this along with other aspects of ancient Stoicism seem to receive less emphasis.
Towards the end of the discussion I talk about Effective Altruism, what a great thing it is, and also how much it bugs me and why :) The video of the discussion is on YouTube here.
How Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent courage viral
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’s as simple as just his actions move us because he’s doing his job, like the captain of an old ship that has foundered committing themself to save all or go down with the ship.
He says we’re now in a different world to that, where politicians never say quite what they mean.