Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur, and commentator on the economy, society and innovation.

As the author of the Fairfax-Lateral Economics Index of Australia's Wellbeing, he regularly measures Australia's levels of wellbeing adjusting the national accounts numbers from which GDP is generated to take into account the environment, health, education, inequality and job satisfaction.

A frequent contributor to the policy debate, former finance minister Lindsay Tanner has described him as Australia's foremost public intellectual.

The founder and CEO of Lateral Economics, Nicholas is a former Chair of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and of the Federal Government's premier innovation advisory body, Innovation Australia. He was also the founding Chair of the data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, which has since been acquired by Google.

Nicholas has published numerous essays on political, economic and cultural matters, several of which have been published in annual "best of" anthologies.