Awakening the better angels
1. Life as an entanglement of mutual obligation
Human institutions (whether they’re formal organisations or just cultural expectations) entangle us in mutual obligations. We’re happy and prosperous when we we’re doing our bit for others and they’re doing theirs for us. When they don’t work so well, it’s usually because private interests have colonised our institutions to turn social expectations to their own advantage.
2. Merit selection and leadership
We think of our society as broadly meritocratic, but we’re the first civilisation that can’t build beautiful buildings. Almost invariably our leaders have won a competition to lead — a competition for fame, money, power. But that makes leadership about that competition, not goodness or serving others. Should the leaders of our public bureaucracy, our schools, hospitals, not-for-profits, libraries, media really be those who’ve out-competed their rivals and if self-assertion is a precondition for promotion, how does that bias the ‘gene pool’ from which our leaders emerge.
3. What's to be done?
We’ve known of democratic, merit seeking institutions that aren’t biased towards self-assertion and self-serving for over a thousand years. We should introduce them alongside existing institutions and expand their role as we gain experience with them. They bring out the better angels of our nature.
Nicholas Gruen
Lateral Economics’ CEO 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.
He is Visiting Professor at Kings College London and Adjunct Professor at UTS. He chairs the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australian Chapter) and is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo. He is a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia.
He was Chair of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation until 2016 and Chair of the Australian Government’s principal innovation advisory body, Innovation Australia, until 2014.
He was second shareholder and Chairman of successful San Francisco based startup, data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, subsequently acquired by Google in March 2017. He is an angel investor in various other Australian and international startups including Breezedocs, Slant.co, HealthKit and Lendable.