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ngruen.bsky.social

@ngruen.bsky.social
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And in the wake of Brisbane’s stunning Grand Final win, a new ponderous thoughtfulness came over the land, summed up in the aphorism, "Why say something in one and two syllable words when you can say it in seven syllable words quoted from ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers.
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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 11/09/2026
(we do the nazis an undeserved favor when we say they went after "the jews" when their definition of who qualified was much broader that those who would have self-identified as such, for example.)
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Teaching children ethics and morality works best through irony rather than rigid lectures. Children grasp nuance quickly when parents encourage independent critical thought.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Well this is the smartest, funniest thing I've seen in weeks!
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Modern society offers endless external rewards, but destroys our intrinsic motivation. Alasdair MacIntyre proves this using a brilliant chess analogy about trading strategic vision for cheap candy. Stop playing for sweets.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Listen to the rest of the Five of My Life podcast episode with Nigel Marsh here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...
podcasts.apple.com
#203 Nicholas Gruen
Podcast Episode · Five of My Life · 10 August · 51min
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Put your hands in the air This week's Substack nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/put-your-h...
nicholasgruen.substack.com
Put your hands in the air
And things that didn’t go viral this week
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
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.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Listen to Nigel Marsh and Nicholas Gruen discuss this on the Five of My Life podcast: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...
podcasts.apple.com
#203 Nicholas Gruen
Podcast Episode · Five of My Life · 10 August · 51min
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
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.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Listen to the rest of this podcast episode here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f...
podcasts.apple.com
#203 Nicholas Gruen
Podcast Episode · Five of My Life · 10 August · 51min
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Jacqui Lambie @jacquilambie.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
“It’s the worst combination of bloody-mindedness and self-harm you can imagine.” @ngruen.bsky.social 👏 #auspol
smh.com.au
‘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...
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
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.
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Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 02/08/2026
via @ngruen.bsky.social whose discussion should not be missed. nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/social-fab...
nicholasgruen.substack.com
Social fabric: The Price of What Survives
Some reflections on the social fabric (which we've taken to calling 'social capital')
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
Academia: from inefficient effectiveness to efficient ineffectiveness nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/academia-f...
nicholasgruen.substack.com
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?
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Brilliant cover design for Aristotle’s ethics. Ethics is all about whose perspective you’re looking through.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
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.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
“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
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
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.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
The Spanish have a term for the last portion which noone will have for fear of looking greedy “The morsel of shame”
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
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 ;)
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
The Spanish have a term for the last portion which noone will have for fear of looking greedy “The morsel of shame”
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Wanna know why politicians won’t tell you the truth? You wouldn’t vote for them if they did!
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
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...
retractionwatch.com
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…
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
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...
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
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)
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
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...
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
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.
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
"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...
nytimes.com
Opinion | If It Feels Right ... (Published 2011)
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
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...
youtube.com
The Anti-Dictator Playbook | That Trippi Show
YouTube video by Lincoln Square
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
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)
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
In early 2020, medical establishments treated Covid like influenza despite contrary evidence. Leaders prioritised public reassurance over facing the scary facts. This reveals a fundamental flaw in systems that value rule-making over genuine problem-solving.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Open competition for power in our politics has its downside. We need some countervailing institutions to slow the rise of psychopaths to the top and to focus democracy on what kind of future we want rather than on which memes can be got to fly.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Competition can be a trap. For centuries, we have designed institutions that run on and reward self-interest, squeezing out the shared centre that actually matters. We either learn to collaborate on a planetary scale or we watch everything we have built fall apart
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ngruen.bsky.social @ngruen.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Lateral Economics has been engaged by Macquarie Point Vision to update my January 2025 report on the cost of the proposed Macquarie Point stadium in Hobart.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Are we hardwired to fail, or are our institutions just designed poorly? History shows that when we build for our "better angels," things actually work. It’s time to move past the contest and start solving problems before it’s too late for all of us.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Ever feel like the system is just a game where the rules don't apply to everyone? When we let partisan interests take over the shared centre, justice disappears and costs blow out. Watch to see why we need a neutral umpire to get back to reality.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Why does every political leader today sound like they’re reading from the exact same PR script? Back in the 70s, leaders actually admitted when they changed their minds or disagreed with their party. Today, it’s all 14-second soundbites and stolen credit.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Are you tired of politicians answering to algorithms? We swim in a toxic swamp of echo chambers and endless news cycles. Uncover the truth about our political landscape and see how a citizens' assembly provides a real solution to this mess.
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Daniel Drezner @dandrezner.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Really looking forward to JD Vance campaigning for Netanyahu later this year.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
How to win an election - The ugly truth You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Stop falling for the slogans and the media portrayals. Watch how the winning strategy actually forces leaders to ignore "we the people" just to keep their funders happy.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Ever notice how politicians dodge every awkward question during debates? We traded real conversations for pre-rehearsed talking points and zero-sum contests. See why the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate was one of the last real political conversation.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Stop scrolling for a second and ask yourself: why do some online comments make you so mad? Social media isn't a meritocracy; it’s a clickbait engine fuelled by your anger. Here is how the "wrongness" of the internet traps your brain.
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The Shared Centre @thesharedcentre.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Why does the loudest person in the room always seem to win online? We’ve built a "shoutocracy" that rewards rage over actual merit, but there’s a way to fix the middleware of our democracy. Discover how bridging algorithms can actually help us find common ground again.
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