Nicholas Gruen

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 an omlette without breaking eggs.  My recent interview with Leon Gettler.  

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.

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.