Nicholas Gruen, economist and former chair of the Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce debates the ways in which 2.0 thinking and technologies are changing economic definitions of public goods.
In this far-ranging discussion, Nicholas explains how Gov 2.0 is a nexus between ‘Jefferson’s dream’ of the transformative potential of ideas as public goods, and ‘Schumpeter’s nightmare’ of the chaos of direct democracy. He argues that democracy is chaos unless it’s mediated by specialists, and that the social web actually makes it harder to get the leaders we need to govern.
About Dr Nicholas Gruen
Dr Nicholas Gruen has advised two Australian Cabinet Ministers, directed the Business Council’s New Directions program and sat on the Productivity Commission. He is founder of economic policy consultancy Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. He is a frequentnewspaper columnist and media commentator and a prolific blogger at Club Troppo.
He is Chairman of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, Online Opinion –an internet forum for opinion on political and cultural matters –and medical ICT startup Specialist Link. He was the founding chairman of Kaggle, a Melbourne ‘big data’ start up now based in San Francisco. He is also a board member of Sustainability Victoria and the Federal Government’s Innovation Australia.
In 2009 Nicholas chaired the Federal Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce.
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Feature image on public goods courtesy Nicholas Gruen under Creative Commons license
Episode links and resources
- Presentation summary and slides: Realising Jefferson’s Dream, Avoiding Schumpeter’s Nightmare: Democracy, Deliberation and Government in the Age of Web 2.0’
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