Pillar Talk – Details, episodes & analysis

This week, Statecraft is joined by the indefatigable Dan Quill to talk about that mysterious second 'P'... philosophy! As animated as always, Dan explains just how philosophy fits into a PPE degree, before walking us through some of the major strands of the discipline. Discussion revolves about the role of philosophy, not just a standalone subject, but rather a set of crucial tools with which one can better understand the workings of power and the economy. Discussion also revolves around which courses are worth the HECS debt. Not an episode to be missed, Dan helps us realise just how important and rich a basis in philosophy can be.

Next time, join us as we continue our focus on the big ideas of PPE with Sam, who adroitly explains how PPE is better than BAFE at everything. See you then!

In response to absolutely ravenous fan demand, Pillar Talk is back! We round out our programming for this semester in Lachie and Aunima’s welcome company, trying to explain a little about the social side of PPE. Our two interviewees join Kaya in an engaging group discussion, talking a little about how they were introduced to the PPE community (big shoutouts to netball), their favourite events, the role of drinking within the program, and what they get up to as executives in the society! 

Perfectly times to coincide with third-round Soiree tickets coming out this Wednesday, our third episode of the PPES Survival Guide is tailor-made to be enjoyed whilst speed-typing essays, cramming exam content, or whatever other activities are taking up the end of your semester. 

What's causing inflation?

Is it 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon'?

What's the rationale behind central bank independence?

And what can policy-makers do to curb inflation?

In this episode, Will & Ollie chat with Dr Begoña Domínguez from the UQ School of Economics about all things inflation.

Dr Begoña Domínguez has a PhD in economics from the University of Barcelona, and today conducts research into fiscal and monetary policy, as well as teaching ECON3200 - Monetary Economics. She is also the Vice-President of the Australasian Macroeconomics Society 

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Read More in Statecraft

Michael Steinbeck - The Rhetoric of Responsibility: How the RBA is surfing the inflation wave

Isaac Haynes - The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: A Crisis of Context

References

See Begoña's UQ Researcher Profile for a list of her recent academic publications.

The latest inflation figures from the RBA. 

The ABS' announcement of their new monthly inflation indicators.

Olivier Blanchard's argument in favour of increasing the inflation target. 

Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens(Recommended by Begoña) 

Garry Kasparov - Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (Referred to by Begoña regarding the predictability of Russia's invasion of Ukraine)

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KPMG is a platinum sponsor of the UQ PPE Society. They provide a range of professional services for businesses, non-profits, and government, including consulting on the design and implementation of key government policies. As mentioned during the ad break, they offer two programs that might interest you: a 12-month graduate employment program, and a 4-8 week vacation internship program for students in their penultimate year of study. For more information about these opportunities, click here, or reach out to the UQ PPE Society using vocations@uqppes.com.au to talk about meeting with one of our contacts at KPMG.

FTI consulting is also a platinum sponsor of the UQPPES. As well as sponsoring our upcoming Policy Challenge , to take place on the 25th of August, FTI consulting offer a graduate program that might interest you, one that is designed to meet your needs at every stage of your career and consists of on-the-job learning, soft skills training and technical training. For more information, click here , or come along to the FTI Consulting Policy Challenge.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt and Oliver Friendship.

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.

What does it mean to be a citizen?

What is the proper role of experts in a democracy?

How unique is the COVID-19 crisis?

And why do our institutions always seem to forget how to manage crises?

In the first proper episode of this season of Pillar Talk, your hosts Will & Ollie sit down with Dr Alastair Stark from UQ’s School of Political Science to address these questions and more, discussing deliberative democracy, crisis management, and institutional amnesia.

Dr Alastair Stark describes himself as a political scientist working in the field of public policy. He is an expert in crisis management, which he explores in his 2015 book Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector, and his 2018 book Public Inquiries, Policy Learning, and the Threat of Future Crises. He also has an ongoing research interest in the institutionalization of participatory modes of governance such as deliberative democracy. Find out more about Dr Stark here.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt and Oliver Friendship.

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.

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KPMG is a platinum sponsor of the UQ PPE Society. They provide a range of professional services for businesses, non-profits, and government, including consulting on the design and implementation of key government policies. As mentioned during the ad break, they offer two programs that might interest you: a 12-month graduate employment program, and a 4-8 week vacation internship program for students in their penultimate year of study. For more information about these opportunities, click here, or reach out to the UQ PPE Society using vocations@uqppes.com.au to talk about meeting with one of our contacts at KPMG.

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References:

See Dr Stark’s UQ Researcher Profile for a list of his scholarly publications.

David Easton – A Systems Analysis of Political Life (book recommended by Dr Stark)

Edmund Burke – Speech to the Electors of Bristol (referred to by Ollie regarding the role of experts)

Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice (an accessible account of how ‘too many choices’ can lead to bad decision-making)

John Kay & Mervyn King – Radical Uncertainty (referred to by Will)

What's behind the name 'Pillar Talk'?

Why are we making a podcast at all?

How much could you win for reading all of Hobbes' Leviathan?

Is Ollie really a raging conservative, and Will a radical Marxist? 

In this introductory episode, we answer all these questions and more, explaining why the UQ PPE Society is making a podcast, what you can expect from this new initiative, and what perspectives we bring to the podcast as hosts.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt, Oliver Friendship, and Tom Watson. 

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.  

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• Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition (Recommended by Will) 
• Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens (Recommended by Tom)
  • See also Connor Harvey's review of this title in Statecraft Magazine
• Douglass C. North - Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Recommended by Ollie)

In our second episode, the Publications team dives into the murky pool that is the PPE job market! With graduate job applications in full swing (and PPE Pathways coming up on the 19th of March!), it seems high time to have a chat to some employment experts and find out their perspectives on getting students into jobs.

Our two guests for this week are Lucy Boyle, UQPPES Vice President of Vocations, and Devika Moss, a 2024 PPE graduate currently working in the Queensland Government's Policy Futures graduate program. As well as discussing what strategies this year's graduating cohort can employ, we consider what sort of opportunities other cohorts should be looking out for, as well as whether things like GPA and choice of major are as important as they're cracked up to be.

It's a new year, and with it comes new UQPPE initiatives! This is the first episode of the PPE Survival Guide, a series of interviews organised by the UQPPE Publications Portfolio to help communicate different perspectives on the degree. The PPE cohort has always been brimming with warnings, stories, and advice: our hope is that this series helps broadcast these experiences throughout the degree, as well as to give people outside of the degree a bit of an insight into what studying PPE is all about!

Our first guest is Jack Sutton, the current president of the UQPPE Society. Jack and Elliott chat about the role of president, the opportunities out there for PPE students, and what advice they would pass on to 2025's first years.

In the final episode of season one of Pillar Talk, Will and Ollie chat with Dr Cameron Murray. Cameron is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney Henry Halloran Trust, specialising in the economics of property and urban development, environmental economics, rent-seeking, and corruption.

This conversation covers a lot of these topic areas, beginning with Cameron’s work on corruption, before honing in on the ongoing crisis of housing affordability, and Cameron’s proposed solution: a policy he calls HouseMate.

To read more about this and other ideas of Cameron's check out his substack here.

This episode is a follow-up to the 2022 Statecraft Autumn Lecture, which Cameron gave back in March last year, on the topic: Why politicians must pretend to care about cheap housing. As with the lecture & podcast we did with George Brandis, you don’t need to have seen that lecture to know what’s going on here, but I recommend you checking it out anyway, as it was a real highlight of my time with the UQ PPE Society, and clarifies a lot of the issues discussed in this episode.

This is the last episode we’re uploading from the first season of Pillar Talk. As such, I just want to take a moment to thank both Will and Oliver for their efforts with the podcast in 2022. In my opinion, both did a great job hosting these episodes, and I’m particularly grateful to Will for his passion in getting the project up and running, and for his work in organising all the guests for what has been a fantastic first season. Will, Ollie, and the rest of the graduating cohort of 2022, thanks, congratulations, and all the best starting your careers post-PPE.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt and Oliver Friendship.

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.

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KPMG is a platinum sponsor of the UQ PPE Society. They provide a range of professional services for businesses, non-profits, and government, including consulting on the design and implementation of key government policies. As mentioned during the ad break, they offer two programs that might interest you: a 12-month graduate employment program, and a 4-8 week vacation internship program for students in their penultimate year of study. For more information about these opportunities, click here, or reach out to the UQ PPE Society using vocations@uqppes.com.au to talk about meeting with one of our contacts at KPMG.

In this episode, I join Will at the table as we chat with Dr Adrian Moore.

Adrian is an academic philosopher, with a keen interest in both continental and Eastern philosophy, especially existentialism, anarchism, and Buddhism. You can read his PhD thesis, which we discuss in the podcast, here.

In this conversation, we cover these topic areas, and much more. It was a really interesting conversation to be a part of, and both Will and I found ourselves taking long detours down philosophical rabbit-holes about the nature of consciousness and the self, non-dualism, and Pythagoras’s religious obsession with the number 3.

This was a less structured and more wide-ranging chat than we normally do at Pillar Talk, and I’ve chosen to leave it uncut – in part for my own sanity as an editor, and in part to let you enjoy the rabbit-holes as much as I did. I hope you do.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt and Oliver Friendship.

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.

***

KPMG is a platinum sponsor of the UQ PPE Society. They provide a range of professional services for businesses, non-profits, and government, including consulting on the design and implementation of key government policies. As mentioned during the ad break, they offer two programs that might interest you: a 12-month graduate employment program, and a 4-8 week vacation internship program for students in their penultimate year of study. For more information about these opportunities, click here, or reach out to the UQ PPE Society using vocations@uqppes.com.au to talk about meeting with one of our contacts at KPMG.

In this episode, Will and Ollie chat with UQ’s very own John Quiggin.

John is a bit of a favourite among UQ PPE students. One of Australia’s most prolific academic economists, and an avid blogger, he is a common contributor to public debate, and isn’t scared to share his hot takes on topical issues. John takes the third year PPE course PPES3101, where he draws on his experience as a former member of the Australian Climate Change Authority to deliver a course focused on the economic and political dimensions of climate change. 

In this conversation, John talks about the 2022 Federal Election, Australian climate policy, COVID-19 policy, cost of living, and much more.

For more from John, check out his blog here, or get your hands on his latest book, Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly.

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Pillar Talk is published by the University of Queensland Politics, Philosophy & Economics Society. It is produced by Will Splatt and co-produced and edited by Tom Watson, with music created by Isaac Haynes. Your hosts for this episode are Will Splatt and Oliver Friendship.

If this episode has you keen for more content from the UQ PPE Society, you might want to check out our other publications: Statecraft Magazine, and The Statecraft Review.