Corporate reward systems prioritise workplace survival skills over genuine job competence, and company away days that focus on choosing "pleasant words" fail to build true workplace ethics.
@ngruen.bsky.social
Listen to Nigel Marsh and Nicholas Gruen discuss this on the Five of My Life podcast: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...
#203 Nicholas Gruen
Podcast Episode · Five of My Life · 10 August · 51min
podcasts.apple.com
Modern economics is an incredibly fragile Euclidean structure pretending human beings can be modelled mathematically. In reality, we live in a world of emotivism where people pick up random philosophical artefacts to argue without properly understanding them.
Listen to the rest of this podcast episode here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...
#203 Nicholas Gruen
Podcast Episode · Five of My Life · 10 August · 51min
podcasts.apple.com
“It’s the worst combination of bloody-mindedness and self-harm you can imagine.” @ngruen.bsky.social 👏 #auspol
‘Hard to think of a more wasteful project’: Economist slams ‘bloody-minded’ AFL over stadium
The 18 AFL club presidents will meet to discuss the controversial Tasmanian stadium on Tuesday ahead of the Hall of Fame. Dr Nicholas Gruen has said the cost of the stadium would far outweigh the bene...
smh.com.au
Ancient Athens maintained a stable political system for two centuries without standard elections. Citizens used selection by lottery to create a government that changed every 36 days. We must consider representation by lottery to build a truly representative democracy.
Academia: from inefficient effectiveness to efficient ineffectiveness nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/academia-f...
Academia: from inefficient effectiveness to efficient ineffectiveness
The great failure of university reform wasn’t intensifying competition, but gormlessly ignoring the prior question: what institutions and public goods govern what competitive success looks like?
nicholasgruen.substack.com
Brilliant cover design for Aristotle’s ethics. Ethics is all about whose perspective you’re looking through.
Social media hurts our democratic systems. However, we can construct new digital spaces that prioritise facts over division. By studying how Wikipedia organises knowledge, creators can design tools to encourage healthy debate and build a true digital meritocracy.
A few generations ago we had an authority structure, but now we have an anarchic marketplace for ideas. Everyone gets a say, but that voice must be calibrated according to what they know. We should not barge into conversations when we don't know what we're talking about.
“the city in which those who are going to rule have the least desire to do so must be the best governed city and the one most free from strife. And if it gets the opposite sort of rulers, it must be ruled in the opposite manner Plato, The Republic
Our current system allows politicians to prioritise funders over voters: we need a standing citizen assembly chosen by lottery to assert itself into the voting process. It is time to expose the difference between party lines and what the people actually want.
What if we could have a secret ballot on the issues Congress refuses to touch? From Brexit to gun checks, discover the one mechanism that could make parliaments responsible again. The power of the "better angels" is closer than you think.
The Spanish have a term for the last portion which noone will have for fear of looking greedy “The morsel of shame”
Imagine a branch of government run by ordinary people like you: these everyday people meet, deliberate, and vote on the same issues as the legislature. It is already working in places like Michigan. You will never see voting the same way.
I know you're only kidding Microsoft. I know that you're offering to make something a defalt setting which you've been doing since the mid 1980s, but you never do. Still, we play along. It's a bit like voting really ;)
Politicians divide us because that’s the most effective way to to get our attention. Juries start out trying to solve a common problem. And after they’ve deliberated citizens feel better understood, even if they don’t agree.
The Spanish have a term for the last portion which noone will have for fear of looking greedy “The morsel of shame”
Wanna know why politicians won’t tell you the truth? You wouldn’t vote for them if they did!
It’s commonsense: the rules of the political game need to be kept out of politicians’ hands. But where most democracies did that, the United States did not and is now backsliding on gerrymandering, voter suppression and partisan courts.
The American social scientist Paul Reinsch wrote in 1905: "In colonial affairs, we are in need more of the sense of justice than of benevolence." He quoted an Arab proverb: "One day of justice is better than seventy years of good wishes." From William Easterly’s Violent Saviours.
Your regular reminder Academia is corrupt. Academics pump out the papers, bring in the research funding while, like Ol Man River, complete travesties of its mission just keep on rolling along. 10 committees are investigating the problem to see what can be done retractionwatch.com/2026/04/27/c...
Black marks on published papers don’t change citation rates, new study finds
Among the data analyzed were mean monthly citations per article for 151 papers that were retracted or issued some other editorial notice, and for a set of control articles. The solid vertical lines…
retractionwatch.com
Getting people interested in good government (like how to educate our kids)? Not so easy when political communications are just a part of the entertainment industry www.ft.com/content/5060...
Aristotle comes out against monopoly capitalism shock! “The man who uses a house judges it better than the builder; the diner judges a banquet better than the cook; the steersman a rudder better than the carpenter.” (Politics III.11, 1282a)
Getting people interested in good government (like how to educate our kids)? Not so easy when political communications are just a part of the entertainment industry www.ft.com/content/5060...
Imagine rerunning the Brexit vote using a citizen assembly. Shortly after the original referendum, a citizen jury met to discuss the issues. After four days, the group swung from 26/24 majority in favour to a 30/20 majority against, roughly the position today.
"Asked to describe a moral dilemma they'd faced, 2/3s of young people couldn’t answer or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot." www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/o...
Opinion | If It Feels Right ... (Published 2011)
nytimes.com
A radical strategy to assert democracy against the dictatorship. But from the centre! Great discussion with my friend Joe Trippi @joetrippi.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ZV...
The Anti-Dictator Playbook | That Trippi Show
YouTube video by Lincoln Square
youtube.com
Aristotle comes out against monopoly capitalism shock! “The man who uses a house judges it better than the builder; the diner judges a banquet better than the cook; the steersman a rudder better than the carpenter.” (Politics III.11, 1282a)