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.

A long chat prompted by the issues in this essay — "Needing the eggs: 70 years of going through the motions". 

I talk to friend and collegue Gene Tunny who's doing a great job running an economics podcast from Brisbane. From his shownotes:

David Graeber's BS jobs thesis (previously covered in EP95) lacks microeconomic foundations, according to Dr Nicholas Gruen. In EP97, Economics Explored host Gene Tunny speaks with Nicholas about BS jobs and also about Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Nicholas is a big believer in the potential of CBDC, which he has written about in the Financial Times.

Links relevant to the conversation

Re. BS jobs:

https://queenslandeconomywatch.com/2021/07/10/people-escaping-bs-jobs-covered-in-my-latest-podcast-episode-and-going-into-business-for-themselves/#comments

https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/trust-competition-delusion-gruen/

Re: CBDCs:

https://clubtroppo.com.au/2021/05/19/central-banks-get-serious-on-digital-currencies-2/

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/central-bank-digital-currency-cbdc.asp

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

If we're testing a drug, we want to make sure that it works better than a placebo (like a sugar pill). But if the placebo effect is real we shouldn't ignore it. Our medicine should mobilise it to improve health and to do that it needs to understand it better. 

From Misha's website

Nicholas is a prominent Australian economist and has chaired various Australian government groups and initiatives as well as Kaggle, where he was an early investor. Lindsay Tanner has described him as "Australia's foremost public intellectual".

We cover:

The poem Nicholas recites is from The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory by Mark Raphael Baker, and I extract it and its lead in sentence below:

”Sleep now child, my pretty one

A little bly who has all his teeth

A little boy who will become a great scholar

So hush-a-bye my clever little bridegroom

Shloft zhe mir maybe eltern, maybe sheyne

Nicholas Gruen speaks to Tom about his favourite records, including Paul Simon's "The Boy In The Bubble", how the demise of pop culture and politics began with fast food and continued with social media, his book, "Together: rethinking community and competition in the age of Facebook" and how he thinks we could fix our ailing democracies: https://tinyurl.com/36wpd255.

In physics, we’re used to the idea that at different scales and at different stages of some process, very different things happen. We inhabit Newton’s world of medium-sized things and speeds – planets, trees, footballs and travel at walking, driving or flying speed – even space station speed. When things get very big or fast – intergalactic or close to the speed of light – very strange things happen that defy our own intuitions. And inside atoms when things get even weirder. Likewise during a ‘phase transition’ of some matter from one phase to another – from solid to liquid for instance – strange and counterintuitive things happen.

Something  similar has happened on the internet where transactions costs have fallen to near zero. And strange and fascinating things are happening. Anyway, I’ve been mulling over this for a while now, and verily, along comes this compelling OECD study of the internet. So I’ve written it up in this week’s column in the Age and SMH.

From: ClubTroppo, Nov 2012