Working away on some explainer videos, we discuss the script for an explainer video which is currently called "Knowledge and its enemies" — currently because it's not yet been produced and we might change its name. 

The script begins

"Meet Socrates

The Delphic Oracle proclaimed him Greece’s wisest man

Incredulous, he searched high and low for someone wiser.

Expert craftsmen had more technical skill, but that fed their vanity. So they pontificated on subjects they knew nothing about.

At bottom, Socratic wisdom is an ethical idea — that vanity is the enemy of wisdom.

If you’re wise, you’re radically humble — the more you learn, the more you realise how little you know.

The cathedral of modern science was built on this idea.

That, as much as it offends our vanity, true knowledge begins with scepticism about how much we really know.

And whatever our reputation, the limits of our knowledge must be relentlessly tested against reality.

But somehow we never got the memo.

The enemies of truth-telling remain — deep in our psyche as virulent as ever. …"

As part of Crikey's Democracy Lost series, Crikey's political editor Bernard Keane conducted an extended discussion with Nicholas Gruen on Christmas Eve. Nicholas is one of Australia's finest public policy intellectuals and has written on an extraordinary array of issues while working as a ministerial adviser, Productivity Commissioner, academic and investor. He is also an advocate for citizens' assemblies, and argues that they offer a solution to some of the complex problems besetting our democracy, as well as overcoming the opposition of vested interests to much-needed reforms. He explains why in nearly an hour of free-wheeling discussion.

Another enjoyable discussion with P. Bowman in which we range over the pros and cons of the numerous terms that have come to prominence in our language over the last decade. Words like 'gaslighting' and 'microaggression'. What's distinctive about these terms is firstly their preparedness to break the 'forth wall' of a conversation. They allow one to address not just the words and arguments that others have used but also their intent or even their unintended effects. The result is the prospect of great addition to our language, but more often its weaponisation. 

In this chat we start from an essay of mine called 'needing the eggs'.* We talk about how so much of what matters takes place in all those ways in which what people say and what they do differ — in a thousand ways subtle and not so subtle. Towards the end of the discussion, we also talk about the prospect of a 'new professionalism' in preference to the managerialism of strategies and KPIs (which is always at risk of falling into roleplay) and also in preference to the 'old professionalism' which was replaced by managerialism. We'll explore an institutional framework which might enable us to develop that kind of professionalism in a future discussion.  

*It's not been published but DM @ngruen1 at Twitter for access to it. 

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:

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:

Follow Nicholas on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NGruen1 and read his essays at https://clubtroppo.com.au