Nicholas Gruen | Brilliant Australian Economist On Pokies, Citizen Juries, Institutional Lethargy, Superannuation & The HALE Index

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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-seriousness” he levels at Australian politics, the media landscape, institutions and in a word... bureaucracies.

From his creation of the HALE Index to his decades inside Australia’s public institutions, Nicholas continuously challenges orthodox thinking.

The podcast covers the (in my opinion) radical yet (Nicholas's opinion) ancient idea of citizens’ juries as a second pillar of representation, the reasons bold policy rarely survives bureaucratic reality, and how lessons from the Toyota production system could help governments actually listen to people at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Along the way, Gruen takes us from Australia’s superannuation system to pokies, from the mental health crisis to the subtle erosion of public-spiritedness inside organisations. 

To be specific, these are all the topics covered in this chat.

• The HALE Index of Well-being – Why GDP misses the mark, how HALE works, and what it reveals about Australia’s progress.
• Measuring What Matters – The limits of subjective well-being metrics, correlations between indicators, and why faux indexes mislead policymakers.
• Indigenous Policy Contradictions – The tension between material “gap closing” and self-determination, and why policy rarely confronts it.
• Citizens’ Juries & Political Reform – Introducing random selection into governance and how it could act as a check on elected officials.
• Goodhart’s Law in Action – How turning measures into targets corrupts them, and the problem of gaming metrics in education and beyond.
• Internal vs External Goods – Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework and its relevance to public service, corporate culture, and motivation.
• Institutional Stagnation – Why promising initiatives stall, and how bottom-up programs could scale without being crushed by bureaucracy.
• Toyota Production System Lessons – Building respect for frontline workers into systems and how it transforms performance.
• Australia’s Superannuation System – Strengths, inefficiencies, unfair taxation, and misaligned regulation of self-managed super funds.
• Compulsory Voting & Preferential Systems – How they shape Australia’s political centre and guard against extreme populism.
• Universities Today – The shift from idea-driven discourse to metric-chasing careerism, especially in economics.
• Trade-offs vs Synergies – Why economics often overemphasises trade-offs, and examples of where quality and cost improve together.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Nicholas Gruen
05:41 The Limitations of GDP as a Measure
11:08 Inequality and Its Impact on Well-being
16:45 The Role of Metrics in Policy Making
22:10 The Importance of Community Engagement
41:48 Connecting Education to the Real World
47:24 Learning from Toyota's Success
56:52 The Flaws in Superannuation System
01:02:55 Reforming Auditing Practices
01:11:39 The Shift in University Education
01:20:59 Divergent Perspectives in Economics
01:32:49 Rethinking Representation in Democracy
01:48:25 The Role of Elite Consensus in Political Change
02:07:58 Understanding Domestic Violence in Indigenous Communities
02:21:55 The Role of New Media in Political Discourse
02:26:38 The Impact of Gambling on Australian Society
02:36:08 The Nature of Optimism and Serendipity in Life