Nicholas Gruen

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. 

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)

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.