Nicholas Gruen

This was a fun interview with Leon Delaney about the business of putting a dollar value on mental illness and indeed on death itself. 

I enjoyed this chat with Luke Grant on the Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) Index of wellbeing and our finding that the mental health impact of lockdowns had cost around $13 billion dollars over the course of the last couple of years. But there's much more to the story than that. Here's the story as published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Age. 

In this discussion, I discuss where my approach to economics came from, how from the beginning I'd tried to steer economic policy making away from tribal disputes to find what the parties could agree on and how I started generalising that approach much more widely than economics. 

P Bowman and Nicholas Gruen on 13th Jan 2022.  Following up on our last discussion in about the significance of paying attention to things that surprise you or deviations between the way people describe their behaviour or their situation and what one can observe we explore similar questions in the world of politics.  We begin by discussing this post on my distinction between policy ideas and policy hacks, and, later in the podcast talk about James Burnham's devastating critique of political thought as wish fulfilment. Viz: <blockquote>It would be a great error to suppose that Dante’s method, in De Monarchia, is outworn. His method is exactly that of the Democratic Platform with which we began our inquiry. It has been and continues to be the method of nine-tenths, yes, much more than nine-tenths, of all writing and speaking in the field of politics. The myths, the ghosts, the idealistic abstractions, change name and form, but the method persistently remains. It is, then, important to be entirely clear about the general features of this method.</blockquote>

I enjoyed this conversation with P Bowman, a super thoughtful fellow with whom I've been discussing some possible collaborations. The conversation began with him asking me why I come up short when people ask me for books to read that will enable them to more fully understand things I've said. Short answer: because I didn't get my ideas out of books and I didn't get them by 'applying' some professional training I've had in economics or anywhere else. Of course those things provide a backdrop and a box of tools, but I cooked up my ideas slowly by paying attention and pondering things that surprised me. Anyway, what good is a short answer when you can give a long answer? It was a fun and quite wide ranging conversation. It's also a bit amusing to reflect that while I begin by saying that I can't provide people with 'tips and tricks' to think better, I end up offering some — well let's call them tips and tricks ;) (Apologies for some background noise during the recording.)

From Infinite Loops Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator. He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. We discuss: Fast foodification of Democracy Isegoria, or equality of speech Pros and Cons of a citizen jury How citizen juries help in nuanced policy discussions Using philanthropy for political experiments And MUCH more! Follow Nicholas on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NGruen1 and read his essays at https://clubtroppo.com.au

Social and marketing researchers run focus groups to find out what people are thinking. But usually they skim the surface to find out people's concerns so they can parrot them back to them. This is good for campaigning and marketing, but it skims the surface of people's thinking. It doesn't require them to deliberate and it doesn't elicit HOW MUCH they care about things. Plumbing those depths requires a different approach — for instance one in which you get people to deliberate and, even better, make difficult choices that enable you to see how much they care about things compared with others. 

An interview on The Wire following the Greens picking up my Central banking for all. You may also be interested in my piece for the FT on central bank digital currency. 

Another podcast with Tyson Yunkaporta. Here's his introduction …  Friend of the pod, Nicholas Gruen, tries to help me get to the bottom of my theories about supply and demand. Turns out economics as a discipline is so opaque that it's turtles all the way down and there's no proof to be found - just interesting perspectives through stories about property auction smoking ceremonies and Mafia internships.

Here's how Tyson describes this exchange:  Nicholas Gruen is a white Kant philosopher who keeps talking to me about Western philosophers when I'm supposed to be working. We kick this one off with a Fidelio monologue I wrote for the Opera House this season, while I try to finish a chapter on the Enlightenment and Nicholas tells me the best bits of the Age of Reason that will be worth keeping after the global economic system collapses. And I get schooled on my "vulgar Marxist interpretation" of Hegel, which I completely deserve.