Nicholas Gruen (born 1957) is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on economic reform, innovation and the CEO of Lateral Economics. He is a visiting professor at King's College London's Policy Institute. He was formerly chair of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the Australian Government's Innovation Australia and Kaggle. Former Australian Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner called him "Australia's foremost public intellectual" while Martin Wolf described him as "the most brilliant economist you've never heard of".
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Gruen graduated from the University of Melbourne Law School and has a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in history from the Australian National University. He has a PhD from the Australian National University.
Gruen worked as adviser to Senator and Federal Industry Minister John Button from the early 1980s and was regarded as the architect of the Button car plan, which freed up automotive trade, eliminated quotas, reduced tariffs and assisted exports during the transition. From 1990 to 1993 he was economic adviser to Treasurer John Dawkins. He was appointed to the Productivity Commission on which he served until the late 1990s when he joined the Business Council of Australia directing its New Directions project. In 2000 he founded economic consultancy Lateral Economics and a discount finance broker Peach Home Loans. In this period he has advised Federal and State Governments both as a consultant and when appointed as member or chair of various official committees. He was a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia. In 2011 he was appointed to the board of Innovation Australia and was subsequently appointed as its chair. He also chaired the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australia)
Gruen has become prominent in public economic discussion. He had a regular economic column for the Courier Mail and later wrote regularly for the Australian Financial Review. He contributes regularly to the popular group blog Club Troppo and has a weekly substack.
He built the Herald/Age Lateral Economics (HALE) Index of Wellbeing, which augments official national income measures to take account of the implications of changes in inequality, human capital, natural capital, and major health issues such as life expectancy, mental illness and obesity.
He has mounted the public case for various reforms including
More recently he's written of the way government initiatives focus on things they aspire to do, without focusing on what matters — which is learning how to do them. [9] These observations apply in areas like 'resilience', 'social inclusion' and 'wellbeing' each being a deus ex machina, or fad diet taken up by government hoping it will save it from itself. Each comes and goes, like the themes of an annual ball, building little before the next fad diet is taken up. [10]
Gruen was a member of the Federal Government's Review of the Australian Innovation System in 2008 and chaired the Government 2.0 Taskforce for the Australian Government. [11] The Government subsequently accepted all of the major recommendations of the Taskforce.
Gruen was also the first investor in Kaggle (a Melbourne-based data analytics company founded in 2010) serving as its first chairman. [12] He was an early investor in HealthKit and its first chairman and has invested in a range of other Australian and international start-ups.
In 2014 Gruen suggested a radical bank reform that would solve a range of problems. According to Gruen, ordinary people should be able to use central banks' services as commercial banks can. For big commercial banks get high margins or fees but don't add much value to those services. Due to the internet, the Bank of England, for instance, could easily extend its services to everyone in the UK. For one thing it should offer deposit and savings account to all. [13]
Gruen is the son of prominent Australian economist Fred Gruen and the brother of former Federal Treasury official and current Australian Statistician [14] David Gruen.
Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. was an American economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended the high levels of inflation seen in the United States throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He previously served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979.
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is a statutory authority of the Australian Government and the prudential regulator of the Australian financial services industry. APRA was established on 1 July 1998 in response to the recommendations of the Wallis Inquiry. APRA's authority and scope is determined pursuant to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority Act, 1998 (Cth).
Craig Anthony Emerson is an Australian economist and former Australian Labor Party politician. He served as the Australian House of Representatives Member for the Division of Rankin in Queensland from 1998 until 2013. Emerson also served as Minister for Trade and Competitiveness, Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research and Minister for Competition Policy, Small Business and Consumer Affairs in the Rudd and Gillard Governments.
Sir Geoffrey John Mulgan CBE is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL). From 2011 to 2019 he was Chief Executive of the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and Visiting Professor at University College London, the London School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne. In 2020, he joined the Nordic think tank Demos Helsinki as a Fellow.
Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Prescott died of cancer on November 6, 2022, at the age of 81.
Klas Eklund is a Swedish economist and author.
Augustine Thomas O'Donnell, Baron O'Donnell, is a former British senior civil servant and economist, who between 2005 and 2011 served as the Cabinet Secretary, the highest official in the British Civil Service.
Henry Isaac Ergas is an economist who has worked at the OECD, Australian Trade Practices Commission as well as at a number of economic consulting firms. He chaired the Australian Intellectual Property and Competition Review Committee set up by the Australian Federal Government in 1999 to review Australia's intellectual property laws as they relate to competition policy.
Fred Henry George Gruen was an Australian economist, an early and influential voice in favour of free trade and tariff reductions in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dame Katharine Mary Barker is a British economist. She is principally noted for her role at the Bank of England and for advising the British government on social issues such as housing and health care.
Sir Timothy John Besley, is a British academic economist who is the School Professor of Economics and Political Science and Sir W. Arthur Lewis Professor of Development Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Andrew SentanceCBE is a British business economist. He is currently Senior Adviser to Cambridge Econometrics. From November 2011 until October 2018, he was Senior Economic Adviser to PwC. He was an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England from October 2006 to May 2011.
Sir David Edward John Ramsden CBE is a British economist and has been Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking at the Bank of England since 4 September 2017. He was previously Chief Economic Adviser to HM Treasury and Head of the Government Economic Service, having previously served as Joint Head of the Service with Vicky Pryce, formerly Chief Economic Adviser and Director-General at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Kenneth Ross Henry is an Australian economist and public servant who served as the Secretary of the Department of the Treasury from 2001 to 2011.
Sir Vito Antonio Muscatelli is the Principal of the University of Glasgow and one of the United Kingdom's top economists.
Benoît Georges Cœuré is a French economist who has been serving as President of the Autorité de la concurence since 2022. He previously served as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from 2012 to 2019.
Don Drummond, is a noted Canadian economist, having served extensively in the federal Department of Finance Canada, as Chief Economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank and as a scholar at Queen's University. He is known for his wide contributions to public policy in Canada and extensive citation on economic issues.
The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), also known unofficially as the "Nudge Unit", is a UK-based global social purpose organisation that generates and applies behavioural insights to inform policy and improve public services, following nudge theory. Using social engineering, as well as techniques in psychology, behavioral economics, and marketing, the purpose of the organisation is to influence public thinking and decision making in order to improve compliance with government policy and thereby decrease social and government costs related to inaction and poor compliance with policy and regulation. The Behavioural Insights Team has been headed by British psychologist David Halpern since its formation.
Bruce James Chapman is an Australian economist and academic known for being the founder or architect of the HECS system. HECS is the Higher Education Contribution Scheme loans system. He is currently a professor at the College of Business and Economics, Australian National University. In 2001, he became a Member of the Order of Australia (AM), "for service to the development of Australian economic, labour market and social policy". In 2017, Professor Chapman was appointed the inaugural Sir Roland Wilson Chair of Economics.