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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.