TRIGGERnometry - Nicholas Gruen on Immigration, Corruption in Academia and Citizens' Assemblies

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Economist & CEO of Lateral Economics, Nicholas Gruen (@NGruen1) discusses immigration, refugees, the culture wars, Australian politics, academic corruption, bias in academia, fast-food politics, authenticity in politics, Donald Trump, Julia Gillard citizens' assemblies and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissy. And this is the show for you. If you're bored of people arguing on the internet over subjects, they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our fantastic expert guest this week is an Australian economist, the CEO of Lateral Economics, and a self-styled general pontificator. Nicholas Gruen, welcome to Trigonometry. Hi, Constantine. Hi, hi, Francis. It's great to have you.

have you here. Listen, for those people who don't know you, just give us a little overview of who you are, what's been your journey through life, how are you, where you are. Okay, so let me just say that my brother, my father was quite a prominent economist in Australia and my brother and I had two, both of us had an ambition not to become economist, and we both failed, not just me. But it's an important part of my story because I knew, I got an intuition about economics long before I studied economics and I found, I I went and worked for our industry minister, a guy called Senator John Button in the 1980s, worked on car industry policy, and I found, to my dismay, that economics was being used

not as a method of thinking, but as a badge of tribal identity. If you were trained as an economist, you knew what you thought before you checked out the subject. And I've realized now that the company that I started many years later, which I'm I call lateral economics. I actually have given a paper called lateral economics a brand or a method. And I think it's a method. And it's the way I go about things, which is to stay away from pre-cooked conclusions, whether they're in my discipline, in any other discipline, or in politics or anywhere else. And so that leads me to kind of figure stuff out for myself. And if that sounds

like a cliche it is. But it takes a long time to unlearn all the... all the things that you're being taught, and to kind of go through the process of actively deprogramming yourself against all these messages that are coming in. So that's my pitch. That's my value prop as a contributor to public debate on economics and more widely. That's fantastic, and that's why we wanted to have you on the show, and we'll talk about economics and the academia side of things as well a little bit later.

But just tell us a little bit of what's happening in Australia. One of the things we talk on this show a lot about is the culture wars and all this kind of stuff. Where are you guys with that? Well, I think we were in a very good place in the 80s and 90s where we led the world in economic policy and we had a government. In fact, there was a bipartisan consensus on things like race, gender and so on. And that broke down as you could. If you were looking to blame the Labor Party, you would blame Paul Keating, because he was, who was the Prime Minister from 1991 to 1996, and he was very divisive.

But he was still part of the bipartisan consensus, which didn't go after culture wars. But then on the change of baton to John Howard as Prime Minister, he famously was very insightful in revving up what seems to have been latent in the Australian psyche, which is that if white Rhodesian farmers were boat people floating off our coast, I'm sure we would have wanted to save them, but if they're brown people from the Middle East or Asia, not so much. And so we've slid into a pretty unpleasant state of affairs where, you know, where, well, we are keeping people out.

Now, of course we have to keep people out. There are 60 million refugees who, not all of which could come to Australia, but it's appropriate that we don't just say any old person can come in here. But the lengths that we've gone to in dehumanising people is, is a national shame and most people feel it. But there we are. It wins elections and neither of the major parties. A bit like Brexit, where the elites sort of kind of appreciate it,

might not be the greatest policy, they think that the people will crucify them if they move away from that policy. So we've got something similar going on in Australia. And do you think that that policy has been brought about because of racism or do you think it's brought about through other things as well. Like we had one particular guest on who, you know, who was saying, you know,

it's because they want to keep, the reason we voted for Brexit is because we want to be British culture intact. Do you think that is what is going on in Australia or do you think it's more overt simply that the distrust of another culture? Before you answer that, sorry, Francis. That interview will come out after this one. So Francis is giving you a tasty preview of my interview with Eric Kaufman who will be out in a couple of weeks.

That's what I like about you. We're just an advertising man. That's right. So anyway, Nicholas, go ahead. I'm a believer in presumptive generosity. When you're interpreting people, it makes sense to try and interpret. You're trying to make as much sense of what they're saying and doing and the way they're acting as possible.

And it's a perfectly legitimate thing to say that we've built a great society here, certainly better than many societies around the world, and we want to protect that. So I don't have any people who feel anxious that too many migrants are coming in from very different cultures. I don't feel that way, but I don't demonise that at all. And then there are some racists. Then there are some very small-minded, bigoted races.

That's not the way I look at the debate in Australia or anywhere else, really. Do you think it's cultural, essentially? It's cultural and it's perfectly legitimate to say, we say, as the Japanese say, we are proud of our culture and it's not compatible with too many people coming in here because then it'll be a different culture. I think people underestimate that. They underestimate the extent to which a culture can remain, can protect the best parts of it and then become more exciting.

We have a commentator in Australia called Philip Adams, who I think his line is that we invited a lot of European migrants into Australia and found that it was so much fun we wanted more. So that's my attitude to immigration. But, you know, I'm not an open, I'm not an open-door policy person either. And I'm in favour of a vigorous and expansive immigration program for Australia. And I respect people who want to, I don't hold up the cross and say you're a racist if people feel differently. So your concern is how those refugees are treated essentially on. Well, I don't want to one of my concerns is self-righteousness. So it's very important for me not to be self-righteous about this because I'm a privileged person who's going to say to a desperate person, sorry, you're not

coming. And whether I draw that line at 200,000, 300,000, 400,000, a million a year, and at the moment it's something like 200,000 or a year, I'm going to be just as much of a bastard as anyone else. So let's get off our high horses. Let's try and make ourselves as comfortable as we can be with a policy, whatever policy we come up with, and we will be making heartless and cruel decisions. Nevertheless, let's make them as...

Let's minimize that and let's feel as good as we can about it. And locking up little kids on islands off Australia without any judicial review, there's nothing good about that. It doesn't make people feel good. I mean, numerous people have died who needed medical attention and didn't get it. I raised $10,000 for refugees at a party about a month ago and a great writer of ours, Christos Sulkis, read the names of those people.

So I feel very strongly about this. I don't feel self-righteous about it, and there's a big difference. My father was a refugee, so that's another reason I feel strongly about it. So do you think the Australian government, oh, I think you've just intimated, is unnecessarily cruel in their treatment of refugee?

Totally. Well, what would you do? If you have my view or anybody else's view and you know that there's a kid on Manus Island who's self-harming, who has pneumonia, who needs medical attention and you say, oh, well, they might be pulling our leg, they might be pulling a stunt.

They probably are pulling a stunt, okay? But they need medical attention, and we should be giving the medical attention, and we're not. Whenever I watch an Australian comedian at a comedy club, the first joke they make is about Australia being a racist society. And it always gets a big laugh and everybody claps and cheers. Is that true? Or would you say that...

Well, we're all racist, so... Well, of course we're all racist. I mean, you know these tests on basketball umpires. You know, I have a friend, I just had a cup of tea with a friend who... He's a Dutchman and he organized... He was instrumental in organizing an experiment on buses where people got onto a bus and said to the bus driver, I'm really sorry, I don't have any money, I just need to get to the next stop.

Would you mind me riding to the next stop? Now, these numbers are made up, but they're indicative, so just assume they're right for the purposes. The 71 or 2% of people had yes said to them. Sorry, about 65%, but if you were white, it was much higher. If you were black, it was lower. And those bus drivers, I don't think they were black-hating racists. but so let's relax about these things let's get let's not get too much on our high horses

all right well it's an interesting start to our interview but let's move on to economics and you mentioned one of the things I like you about you among many things I like about you is something we'll get to the things you don't like when the camera stopped rolling that's when constantin gets on the vodka he goes dark But is that you, I never know, I've spoken many times, I never know where you're going to come out on any particular issue because you're someone who is not ideological and you talked at the very beginning about how you uphold most ideology and it drives people into.

Well, I like it as a starting point, not as a concluding point. And I know that it can hijack your emotions and it gets confirmation bias going too early in the process if that makes sense. So tell us more about that. What is the impact of having these ideologies that you see out there in the world in economics and politics? Yeah. So I think this happens everywhere. And what happens, this may sound like a joke, but, well, you're comedians, so it'll be okay, won't it? But it isn't a joke?

I don't know, you might relate to this precise story, and if you can't, you can relate to something similar. When you're an adolescent boy at high school, where you wear your belt around your hips is a big deal. If you wear it too high, you're effeminate, okay? It's completely ridiculous. And in the 18th century, it was different, and the next century it'll be different again. But something's going on there, which has got a lot of psychological power because it's happening all around the world. And so if you're an economist and this idea, seeps into economic policy, which is, are you a free market guy or are you a big government

guy, then you're going to reach for, you're going to be constantly aware of that, you're going to be aware in meetings about how you're going down, there are going to be cliques and cabals unacknowledged and acknowledged, and acknowledged, and the whole damn thing is actually run by where you're wearing your belt. It's all mad. It's all completely unacknowled, from the merits of the situation. So I don't say that I abhor ideology. I think of ideology as both impossible to avoid and a good starting point because it orients the world.

But then I do, I don't pick sides to be contrary or anything like that, but I do spend a lot of my time trying to find ways to express an idea which don't trigger, to use a word that would work on this program, that don't trigger a response from the other side which says, oh, he's just a lefty or he's just right wing. I will actually try and work out a way, a subversive way to make a point which tries to get under those early warning systems and trick people into thinking for themselves, or at least not having all these incredibly strong mechanisms doing the thinking for them, if that makes sense.

And I've found that it's just been wonderful because I'm able to wander around and I can pick low-hanging fruit. I can say, hang on, well, why don't we... All right, so you're a free market person, you're an intervention person. Forget all that. What's the problem here? What if we did that? And people go, you sound like you're a free market person. I say, no, no, no, forget that.

What if we did that? Would that work better than this? Oh, you're a bit of an interventionist, aren't you? No, no, let's think about that. And through that process, I've, I think, come up with lots of really quite actionable, simple, low-cost, very high-benefit ideas. So there you go. Do you want to give us an example or two?

I'll give you an example or two. So think about the labour market. Think about going and getting a job. Now, I don't know what the sort of language in your country is, but one of the, you know, labour market deregulation is all about flexibility, people being able to move from one job to another. You've got people in trenches

in which flexibility means an employer's, right to hire and fire and what do you call it no listing or you know black listing no no I'm talking about always being available for a job and not being so three hour contract yeah sorry zero hours contract that's right so so that's on one side and then you've got the union and in Australia you've also got quite strong labor market regulation and you would have something like that now ask yourself this question when I go to a job what do I know about whether it's a good workplace or not. The answer is you don't.

Isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing that you've got all these free market types running around saying we should have more flexibility? And yet the absolute essence of a market working well, and you don't have to have read economic theory to do this, you just have to have existed in markets, the essence of a market working well is that everybody's got good information so they can go where they want to go, what they value.

But is anyone paying any attention? attention to that? Well, not that I've noticed. So let's let me ask you another rhetorical question. In fact, we've got lots of data on this because any company that's got more than 20, 30 employees keeps employee engagement data. They're constantly sending them surveys, and I like my boss. I think my boss is a waste of time. I think I'm well trained. It's funny in those things. The one question which everybody says they're below average on is they're not paid as much as they should be. But all the others are sort of up about 70, 80%. This one's down about 46%. So the data's there. And lots of women, but of course it's also true of men, might want

to prioritise a flexible workplace over one with strong career structures or lots of money or whatever. Now of course if you go and you ask the person you're going to work for is this family friendly, well then if they've decided they want to market family friendliness, they all say, yes, here's our family friendliness policy, but we all know that that's a policy and then there's the fact and that there may be a difference. And yet we've got all this data because they'll be polling their own employees about how they're finding this.

So why don't we release the data? Well, that leads to the next... Let me ask you, why don't firms release... the data. Because they don't want to look bad. They don't want to show that, you know, good, you felt, that's exactly what I wanted you to say. So why don't the good firms release the data? I enjoy these bits of the interest. Francis gets asked questions he can't answer. Right. So why don't the good firms release the data? Is it because even within that data, there will be things that they want to hide? Possibly. I think there's a better answer. This reminds me when I was in school.

Constantine's got the answer. Yeah, but I'm not tired. I'm not telling you. But you're the interview. You're the interviewer. And why would the good companies don't want to release the data? Well, I don't know. So I'm a good company.

So let's say, well, let's not say I'm a good company. Let's say I'm KPMG and I release some good data and you're PWC. Yeah. And the data looks good. What are you going to do is PWC? Do you get the stats? You'll have, yeah, no. Well, yes, but you'll have different data because you'll be using a completely different system to measure.

Yeah, that's true. So you'll just go through. it and you'll get your bullshit artists, also called, you know, comms people, to go through it and pick bits out of it that look good. And so it's a zero, it's not going anywhere because bullshit's coming out, not information. So the market failure here is that there is no standard to report to. So Theresa May could say, or Jeremy Corbyn, could say, could could say who wants to take the Prime Minister's challenge to help define a standard or a partial

standard that we will all collect our data. The first ten questions will all be the same of anyone who agrees to follow the standard and it'll be auditable and then the best firms can release that data and it's auditable and then the ones immediately under them are starting to look like all the rest of the firms so they'll release their data. Even though it makes them look worse than those people, it makes them look better than all the people down there and we'll go down. Now we won't get all the way to the bottom. But that costs virtually nothing is largely risk-free and is not ideological. It's problem-solving. So you are an interventionist Nicholas. And notice that there

was no compulsion. So I think if all that worked out, I I might say, oh, and by the way, after we've proven up this system, in five years' time, this is compulsory for everyone. But, well, I might be wrong. We'll just have to see. But that's an example of what we could be talking about. But no, we're not, because it doesn't rev us up. Because it doesn't.

We can't feel self-righteousness either on behalf of the employee or the employer. So it's not good radio, not good TV, not good media. Let's go back to... trench. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing, and most people have no idea what's actually in it. Avicardo

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Go to avocadogreenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. See, as a lay person, one of the things that I think most lay people will think about when they think about objectivity and balance and genuine facts and the pursuit of truth is academia and science and even social science to some extent. Right. Well, I know you were going to say that.

That's the one area I can predict your response on. But maybe not exactly for why I think that. Because I mean, there is a fair bit of political bias or ideological bias. in the social sciences, but there's something much worse than that, which is that over the last 20 or 30 years, we've gone from sort of leaving academics alone, which gave us an inefficient but fairly effective system, to treating academics like lab rats in a skinner box, and they have to produce articles in learned journals by a certain magnitude, of a certain number or they get sacked. And that has them all running round and round and around on this treadmill, producing articles.

And the articles aren't worth anything. The articles are not, the, they're articles which build disciplines but don't build useful knowledge. And it's a catastrophic state of affairs. And so it's also the case that it's certainly in the social sciences, there's quite a bit of there's quite a bit of ideological bias. That's true. And generally, I just think there's too much focus on the polls, on these slogans. Are you free market or are you intervention? Yeah. Well, actually, I think Jonathan Haidt talks about this in his work, is that in the 60s,

it was a ratio of conservatives to liberals in academia. It was like one to two. And now it's one to 10 on average, and in some departments it's like one to 300. Yeah. So politically, there's a very strong bias as well. Yeah, absolutely. No, it's true. It's true. In economics, it's much less true. So economics is much more balanced, I would think. In fact, I don't know, certainly, I don't know about left and right, which would sort of raise as questions of distribution, but in terms of preferences for free market and intervention, economics is sort of biased towards free markets. So the way the discipline is constructed, it's constructed on the presumption that consumers will be.

better at getting what they want than anyone on their behalf, which of course makes perfect sense unless you're dealing with a monopoly, unless you're dealing with trickery, unless you're dealing with bad behavior of any number of different kinds. So it's actually more complicated than that. But the whole way economics is built is to be built on some kind of presumption that, you know, do we really want to mess with this relationship between consumer and producer? And the answer is no, in lots of cases we can realize that markets will work well. And then there are all the interesting cases where there is something wrong with markets,

but there's also something wrong with governments. And can we evolve institutions that do better than what we're doing now? And I've just given you an example of that. We don't spend much time talking about that. And is that the impact of this kind of way of thinking that real-world problems don't get solved instead of we have these battles? That's right. I couldn't, the idea that I've presented to you, I couldn't put that in a, I couldn't

publish that in an economic journal without all kinds of basically idiotic modeling, because they'd go, oh yeah, well, that's an idea, but you need to, it needs to be more than an idea. So what happens is that the discipline ends up looking at things where there's lots of data. So that's the old business of looking for your keys under the light, even though you lost your keys down the road, where there's lots of data, where it's possible to build sort of toy economic models of people interacting. Now, in this area, in the example that I gave you, The reasons why people don't have good information about workplaces are kind of, it's sort of subtle and it's not very easily susceptible to simple modeling.

And most simple modelling just assumes that people know what they need to know and that they have the cognitive power to do whatever calculations are necessary. And I think you would say, I would hope you would say commonsensically, that's not the case there. So we should be able to just jump off from that piece of common sense. If someone wants to come along and challenge it, that's fine. We should be able to jump off from that common sense and then start looking at this as a possibility

and oodles of other ideas. So we were talking a little bit about how we've seen in academia a gradual shift towards the left in not particular in economics, but in some departments. Do you think that's a problem that certain institutions are way over to the left? Yes. And why?

Well, because these things should be starting points, not answers. And because, yeah, we've got a whole lot of people running around, lecturing other people about essentially nothing, about a bunch of talking points, about a bunch of slogans. Disastrous. So what would you mean by a bunch of slogans? Well, we've got the recent example. of fake papers being published. If you learn the techniques and it's hard work to do it,

you can get fake papers published. You can get fake papers published in a surprisingly large number of areas. Now, I happen to have the view that there are whole fake sub-disciplines within economics. So real business cycles is based on the idea that the Great Depression was a spontaneous holiday taken by tens of millions of workers, essentially. It is funny, isn't it? But people have won the Nobel Prize for that work, okay?

It's not, no one's exposed it as a fake because the mathematics is all correct. But the basic assumptions are just risible. You were laughing at them. This happens in economics all the time. And sometimes you should make silly assumptions because they kind of get you to somewhere, which is fertile. But that's really not what's happened in economics.

What happens in economics is, that it's the, this analogy I made with where you wear your belt. There are disciplinary protocols. One of them, I won't, I don't think it's worthwhile boring your listeners with it too much, but one of these protocols is that you shouldn't build a model of the macro economy, the way the whole economy is working without micro-founding it. In other words, without building an elaborate structure which goes all the way from individual agents, and deduces from that macro responses. Now, the problem with that is that we all know that we are members of a herd.

We all know that we are ignorant when we make an investment or when we buy a fashion item, and we all know that there is a degree of emergent herd behaviour. That's a fucking micro foundation, okay, but it's not in mathematics. That sort of micro foundation was already there in cane. in Keynes, in John Maynard Keynes, but it became unfashionable. Keynes was wearing his belt. Too far up his waist and he looked like a dill according to current fashions. And so we developed this proposition that a model is worse for not having micro foundations

and a particular kind of microfoundation. Off with the ferries. But there you are. Those are fake papers and people got Nobel prizes for it. So things are a bit more serious than a few fake papers in some of the more left-wing social science disciplines. And you say it's a bit more serious. How serious are we talking about here? Well, it's 8.1 on the Nichols-Grewan series. I mean, I'd put it possibly 8.2. It's possibly an 8.2.

I don't know where it is on your scale, but I'd recommend about 8.1. That's where I'm thinking. It's a very serious situation. And everyone, well, I can't count the number of times, the number of conversations I've had with young academics who say, yeah, yeah, I know all that. And I'll play over the game for a while and I'll become more influential and I'll change it. I respect that.

I mean, that's an interesting, worthwhile mission to give yourself. But we've heard that from politicians too. And I see this as, there's something very unsatisfying about it. Now, you could say there's something unsatisfying about what I've done, which is to go and try and look at problems on their merits, which is a snake or oil salesman's way of saying, I don't know what. I mean, I try and be as rigorous as I can.

I talk to people who know the field better and so on. And when people ask me, what does lateral economics, does it focus on energy or transport or macro or labour market, I say, yes, it does. But we try to look at things on their merits. And I'm sorry that sounds like, you know, that doesn't say very much, but I haven't given you an example of the sort of thing that we try and find, which is just something that people haven't been talking about or thinking about which offers actionable, high-impact kind of results.

Well, that's what you've been talking about, is not attaching yourself to a particular way of thinking, but rather looking at the reality and going, what can we do with this? And a discipline is a set of tools. It's a set of repertoire, a set of instincts, all of which can be useful and all of which can be questioned, and which need to be assembled carefully for any particular question,

and it will be assembled differently. So if I'm talking about a school system, as opposed to a hospital system, there will be elements of similarity and there will always be elements of difference and we should try to follow the merits of the situation and use these ideas that are in our discipline and in other disciplines to try and come up with good ways of reacting.

Well, you alluded to it. There was a story by the time discussed out it will be a couple of weeks ago with Peter Bogossian and then have, and Plachrose and this other guy who they took a section of Mind Camp. They threw some feminist, feminist buzzwords into it. And they got peer-reviewed and published in the journal. Yeah.

Yeah. That is incredible. Well, dogs and rape culture is another one. Yeah, it's a joke. It's a joke. What can you say? It's, we should all reflect on it because if it's that prominent, I mean, we can see. I mean, we can say, ha-ha. I mean, quite a few of these kinds of papers,

economists are very, there are quite a lot of economists who are very superior about that, as if, you know, that wouldn't happen in economics. It's true that doesn't happen in economics, but mathematically defended nonsense happens in mathematics, it happens in economics all the time. It shows how ignorant we are and how respectful of our own

and everybody else's ignorance we ought to be. Well, I mean, I take a bit of our own, of an interest in business people because they've, well, some of them might have just got lucky, but it's remarkable how often, I mean, this is true, Elon Musk says this, and Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett say this, which is, we make most of our money mostly by trying not to be stupid, not by trying to be very clever. And that's not what academics do. academics don't win any prizes for not being stupid

they win prizes for showing how incredibly clever they are even if it's in the service of something which is ultimately stupid so it's an interesting little paradox and I wouldn't want to get too self-righteous about any of it I mean I did a drama degree so I know what that's about you know a lot about bullshit well let's move on to politics you had some I've always enjoyed listening to talk about the political side of things,

at Kilkenomics and, you know, you've often said that we've done to politics or McDonald's has done to nutrition. Yeah. What do you mean by that? So I think our culture is besieged by fast foodism, if you like. So the paradigm example is we,

is fast food and we evolved on the African savannah and we evolved certain appetites and tastes and cultural practices, and they meant that we liked food that was sweet, that was rich, that was salty, that didn't disgust us. And if you do that on the African savannah, it keeps you away from poison, you know, meat that's gone bad, and it works well for you. And it also works well for you as human beings are, are evolving and getting richer, they then start to create food for themselves that is more

expensive because it's richer and so on. And then at some point, as people start to optimize to sell the food, these instincts betray us. And they don't have to tell me about that, Nicholas, they become poisoned. They become toxified. And I would argue that over our whole culture that we are, and this is in a sense what I was saying about academia, that we had optimised certain things about it to the point of toxicity. We've gone from an inefficient but effective system to an efficient but ineffective system. And in, I mean, so if you take the fast food example, if you think that McDonald's is to, McDonald's is to food, what porn is to sex, and what modern politics is to what we imagine politics should be.

So modern politics has been optimized with an inch of its life. People who are selling a political message, and I was talking to somebody yesterday about Brexit, and she was saying, well, we know what emotional message Theresa May will go with if she gets a deal from Europe, what's our emotional message? And I said to her, yes, well, Adolf Hitler said, of course I reserve reason for the few and emotion for the many. And our politics is so optimized around emotion,

around entitlement, around resentment. This country is famous for having a prime minister who told people they'd never had it so good. I think that was in the late 50s. That didn't go so well for him. Truth telling isn't a great idea of politics. But that was the late 50s or 60s. and now it's got so much more like that, so much more trivialized, so much more sensationalized.

And again, people blame the internet, and of course the internet's a very important part of this story, but it's also very important to realize, at least for me, I was very upset and concerned about democracy before the internet, and the best stat I can give you on that is that on American TV, the length of a sound bite went from 48 seconds to 8 seconds from 1968 to 1988. And we're not going to survive as a democracy with sound bites of 8 seconds. We have to recover reason in our politics. And I wouldn't even really be going on about this, except that I think that we can do it, except that I think I have an idea which can powerfully detox the situation that we're in.

Otherwise, I'd just be kind of grizzling on, and I'd rather focus on things that I think I have some, where I think I can make some kind of contribution. Well, that's what we'd love to do here, Trigonometry, solves the world's problems in one conversation. So why don't you solve it for us? So I believe, so I think the basic idea is to understand that there are, in fact, two ways of representing the people. There is an old way of... So you can have direct democracy.

We actually, now in some sense that they had direct democracy in Athens two and a half thousand years ago, but we might get back to that. But we, since the internet, we actually have the technology to go back to direct democracy. Can you imagine getting home from work, going onto your internet and saying, oh, okay, so we're going to change the weight that a nurse can live. lift in a hospital from five kilograms to three and a half kilograms. Dick? I don't know. So that's one way.

And people are enamoured of the idea that direct democracy might be a good thing. Because that plays to our vanity. Because politics is all about everyone telling the people, the people are good and the politicians are just, the politicians are just tricking them. Well, who votes for the politicians? As Bernard says, when Prime Minister Hacker says to him Bernard, it seems that the civil service exists simply to prevent politicians implementing the sacred promises they made to the people. Well, somebody has to.

So we're all part of this system. So I don't think direct democracy is the answer. I think direct democracy would quite possibly make things worse. Oh, definitely. So we've gone with a representative system. But the representative system that we've gone for makes us feel good and makes us feel that they're doing what we want because they compete for our votes. That's representation by election. There is another way to represent the people.

You might not, since you haven't read my stuff, I'm going to ask you again, what's the other way to take subsets of the community. This is so good. I'm enjoying this. Subsets of the community who will be representative of the community and we do it right now. We did it in ancient Athens and we do it right now in Britain. Look at the discomfort. This already reminds me of, but I used to be a teacher, so this is what I did to kids when they didn't do their homework.

Exactly. I'm making it a feature, not a bag. Nicholas. One of you have done your homework, you haven't? That's good. That's good. There's nothing wrong with that. We've got to have you back.

By the way, you're wearing your belt a little hard. Yeah, I'm not. I'm getting absolutely owned here. This is by far in the way the best episode of Trigonomity, we will ever release. I don't even know the question. It doesn't matter. Representing the people.

How can we represent the people? How can we find another way of getting 300, 500 people to represent everyone in Britain? What Francis thinks about this? Why don't you have a thing and see if you come up with the right house? That's right.

So what is another way? So... They did it in Athens? They're doing it in Britain now. They're doing it in courts. So the jury... So the jury system. That's it.

So you just get ordinary people and you say, what do you think? And that changes everything. It changes the idea that this group is an elite. It only becomes an elite as it learns. So a jury is a cognitive elite for the case at hand because I've been sitting there for the last 12 days and they've been learning. But they represent the people. And if 12 people good and true,

whatever it's supposed to be, say that a guy's guilty. You don't feel the need to, you don't, we don't have lots of talkback radio about how we were ripped off by those rotten jurors. We go, well, if it was good enough for them, they might be wrong, but it's good enough for me because that's the best we can do. We don't do the politicians.

Because we have hooked up the idea of representation to merit. Merit has been toxified by all the dark arts of politic. elections force politicians to fight each other because they can't become a politician without beating another politician. So they're not going to say, well, hang on, we've all got to fix this problem. They're going to say, well, if I say that, I'll say that they'll say I'm tough on crime and that'll get me more votes because everybody's feeling really bad about some horrible murder.

So that toxifies our politics. In a jury, it's all completely different. In a jury, people listen to each other. They're kind of keen to compromise. So let me take you through the psychology of someone being invited onto a political jury. So now I'm talking about what's called citizen juries. Why don't you outline what it would look like, first, Nichol. So you're talking essentially about a third chamber.

So that's one way of doing it. What's being done so far is, so let me give you an example of Oregon. In Oregon, the state of Oregon in the United States, they have citizens initiated referendums. And in 2011, I think it was, or perhaps a year or so later, they had an referendum on mandatory sentencing. Now, who's not in favor of mandatory sentencing? If you are convicted of a felony sex offense, I'm sorry to pick on you again, if you are, but it's just where you were. wearing the bell. If you're convicted of a felony sex offence on four occasions, do you think there should be mandatory sentencing? Yeah. Good. If you are convicted,

it was 25 years in jail. If you are convicted of drunk driving on three occasions, do you think there should be mandatory sentencing? Yeah. I didn't even have even, it's interesting. You said yes, I didn't even tell you what the sentence was. Yeah. But the sentence is three months in Now I answered yes to both those things. 70% of Oregon, of people from Oregon, believe that was a good idea and a citizen's jury was held. 24 people meet for one day per weekend for four weeks, four days, and after that process, and we have to assume the best guess is that 70% of them were four

and 30% were against, or some undecided. And after that process, the 24th, people voted 21 against and 3-4. So obviously, now you can easily imagine, I don't know what the difference was, but I presume you could take someone through a possible, quote, felony sex offence, which actually wasn't such a big deal

that you would put someone away for 25 years. I don't know what that was. But I do not, and I have a lot of faith in ordinary people. If I hear that, I think, well, that was probably a dodgy bill. So that's the idea of a citizen jury. The psychology is different. It's more democratic than our electors and so on. Now how would you, now I guess, yeah, so I want to kind of lead a movement of demanding

a citizen's chamber. Now a citizen's chamber would be several hundred people chosen at random and the one thing that it would do is it would take our eye just ever so slightly off the opinion of the people and give us another view of the considered opinion of the people, which in the case of mandatory sentencing is the difference between, you know, 15 or 16 out of 24 and 3 out of 24. A huge difference. And if that had been the case in Australia, I think an overwhelming majority of a citizen's

job, normal people when they learnt that we were abolishing carbon pricing, which would now be contributing to our budget over $10 billion a year and keeping carbon emissions low and maintaining government services or lowering taxes elsewhere. That was so much, so much better policy than the policy we implemented that it wouldn't have even happened if we'd have had such a chamber because the parliamentarians wouldn't have had the nerve to put through such a shitty policy. And I think exactly the same thing would be true of Brexit here because the difference between the opinion of the people on Brexit, which we know is 52, 48 in favour, or at least

was in June 2016, is about 6040 the other way when you give people enough time to learn about the issues and kind of decompressed from the Daily Mail and the Sun's endless propaganda about, you know, the shape of bananas and pig fat in ice cream and various other things. I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a Democrat on McDonald's. I want a Democrat on, I want to be a Democrat on proper nutrition. And one of the things you've talked about as well is the consequence of not having this kind of thing and having this McDonald's politics where it's sound by its inauthentic politicians is that in some ways someone like Donald Trump,

who in many ways many people would say is deceptive, but you've talked in the past about how there's an authenticity. is quite different. He's not, I mean, everyone knows that he doesn't tell the truth. Everyone knows that he's like a little kid in a playground who makes stuff up all the time. But he doesn't optimize what he's saying. He doesn't get a bank of comms people and PR people to say, this is good for all Americans, or one of those kinds of things.

So that's, so people relate. to that because remember in this optimized sort of politics where keeping people away from their reason and instead encourage or all the all the all the signals they get are emotional signals and it seems to me and this is just some amateur punditry from me but it seems to me that people relate to Donald Trump speaking candidly as he does as he does He tells people when he stuffed things up. I mean, not all the time, not when he's saying he didn't stuff them up. He could say anything.

But he's, and I don't defend the guy. I think he's a nightmare, a complete nightmare. But I'm addressing myself to why he is as successful as he is. And I think people hear those talking points, hear those focus-grouped slogans, and just they've had enough. It's like running your fingers down at Blackboard. People are...

Now, I may just be projecting my own frustrations onto the great mass of the people, but I just think people absolutely hate all that. They get it in advertising. They get it all the time, and they know what they're getting, and they know that it's junk. The thing they haven't owned up to

is that they vote for that chunk. They wouldn't get it if it didn't work. Also as well, doesn't it... Isn't the reason people voted for Trump, people voted for Boris Johnson to be mayor, is that they seem like a version of their authentic self. So people go, oh, I know who this person is, I can then make a decision.

It's why Jacob Rees-Mogg is actually quite popular. I quite like watching his... I quite like watching him, because I sort of like the way he speaks. People tell me he's pretty batty, and I think his views on Brexit are probably baddie, but I don't really know enough about it. But he's...

He knows what he's... thinks he's he's he's pretty straightforward about what he thinks certainly the things I've seen him talk about he's an old this is almost extinct it is extinct in Australia but he's a Berkian conservative he that's just oozes out of every poor and his every poor in his being so yeah people like that and my you know there's lots to like about it and that's the thing is that people look at him and go I know who Jacob Rees-Mogg is yeah therefore I can make a informed decision whereas before in politics you looked at a lot of these people and you'd go

I don't know who you are but for better or worse I think I know who Donald Trump is well yeah but that's for worse yeah yeah yeah I mean that's ultimately we're we're making these very difficult decisions but yeah that that's that's the power of this authenticity and of course you know these people are quite skilled at it you know that line that, you know, if you can fake sincerity, you've got it, you know. George Carlin's great one. Yeah, that's right. The main thing in the show business is authenticity. Once you can fake that, you can do anything.

That's right. That's right. So they're all pros. They're all professionals. And I kind of like the really good, the people who know that. And then use all of that knowledge to project something of some value. But it's an awful. Again, we are getting ourselves into a situation where we are expecting such heroism about politicians. Well, how's that going then? You've actually given an example in the past of an Australian politician who went from being perceived as quite authentic. Yeah, authentic.

Authentistic. Authentistic, I made up a word there. It's a good word. It's a Trumpism. Trumpism, exactly. I'm learning Donald. No, it's a Bushism. I'm learning Donald.

We want to be on TNN. Yeah. Yeah, so you've given that example. Yeah, so Julia Gillard, I think, and I know Julia a bit, and she was the last nice guy we had as Prime Minister since John Gorton, who you will never have heard of, but he was back in the early 70s. But Julia went from being a feisty, forensically intelligent deputy leader with fiery red hair to being a talking point zombie.

Sorry about that, Julia. And I had this little fantasy, and the fantasy was that I'd traips around after her as a staffer for her, because I've worked as a staffer for other politicians, and she'd come out of an interview, and she'd say, how did I go, as they tend to, and I'd say, shit-house, Julia. Here's a DVD. When you get home, you and Tim watch this, and you'll see a real master at work. And when she got home, she'd put it in, and who would it be but herself? and it wasn't even going to be her former self.

It was a particular format that she continued to be very good at, which was Q&A, which is people from the audience asking questions. And she was tremendously, all those things, a little less feisty, but compelling, calm, intelligent, warm, fun, knocked it out of the park. So here we had a kind of superstar in waiting who possibly partly because of the woman thing, possibly partly because she was a woman and was feeling under some kind of pressure to act in a certain kind of way. I don't know. That's pure speculation from my point of view.

She couldn't quite do it. I think she got quite a lot better by the end, and by the end it was too late. But that's my bit of amateur explanation for how Julia had a great honeymoon, made some sort of obvious political mistakes as well, one of which was to be too honest when people said, you've introduced a carbon tax and you promised not to. And the correct political answer was, well, it's not a carbon tax, it's per carbon permits.

And that's the sort of answer that John Howard would have given. And he wouldn't have got out of it. There still would have been some pressure on him, but it was sufficient, but it turns out, I think, in hindsight, that the right answer was to dissemble a bit. And what Julia Gillard did was said, yeah, okay, you can call it a carbon tax. I made the promise in good faith. I had to run a government in coalition with the Greens, and this is what we've come up with, and it's a good policy.

Anyway, so she made some actual political mistakes, which some people could argue with a reason for her not going so well. I think it was this inability to remain authentic through all the spinmeisters and all the pressure and pressure perhaps that she put on herself. She has a fantastic memory as well, and on one occasion she gave a speech almost word for word, perfect with a speech sitting in front of her without looking at her notes. And I think she did a bit of that, in my opinion, she did a great deal too much of it with talking points that she had in her mind and she would return to them to add nauseam. And on one occasion when she was going for election, there was a slogan which was moving forward, which was used 61 times in two speeches and then it was a joke.

Well, I could have told her that. So she was an authentic politician and she presented herself as a talking point zombie, as I've unkindly said. Well, I'm sure she's watching. We're fellows at King's College, so I'm going to see you next week with any luck. All right. You won't have shown this by then, will you? Probably not.

Probably not. So you'll have an opportunity for a good... We'll send it to her anyway. Yeah, thanks very much. Look, the last question we always like to ask, because it's been fascinating to have you on the show, is what is the one thing that no one's talking about that we ought to be talking about?

The details, or not so much the details, but not those two things in the polls. Not the opinion polls, the left and the right poles. That's what we should be talking about. If we're, whatever we're talking about, find something of interest, find something you might be able to make better and forget about all the argy-bargy flying backwards. flying backwards and forwards and see if you can think of ways to make it better

and then grow a group of people around the idea who will agree with you. Fantastic. It's been great to have you on. Thanks, Constantine. I love the way you just think about Francis again. Thanks, well, I thought Francis might say something. I'd say thanks, Francis. It's been great to have you on.

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