The Wonks’ List: The Best Technical Policy Reads of 2024

Each year, our staff curate the Wonks’ List, a selection of the best technical reads for policy enthusiasts. From the housing crisis to trade policy, each of these works sparks discussion on pressing economic issues. On this podcast, Senior Associates Nick Parkinson and Elizabeth Baldwin analyse what made the Wonks’ List for 2024, and why.

Read the list

Transcript

Nick Parkinson: I’m Nick Parkinson and I’m a senior associate in the education team here at Grattan Institute.

Last year we released our annual Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, selecting our top picks for the Prime Minister and all interested Australians. But for those of you who want to dive a bit deeper, we’ve got something special today and that is our annual Wonks List. It’s a selection of curated technical reads.

It’s there to really indulge in our nerdiest tendencies. Think less reading by the pool and more pooled regression models. You can read the full list on our website, but today to discuss the list, I’m delighted to be joined by senior associate and in my view, the very wonkiest of wonks, Liz Baldwin.

Hey Liz.

Elizabeth Baldwin: Hi, Nick. Great to be here.

Nick Parkinson: Thanks so much for joining me. So, to kick us off Liz, I wanted to talk about the first book on our list. It’s a collection of essays by American journalist, Jerusalem Demsas. And it’s called On the Housing Crisis. Now Liz, I know you’re a bit of a lover of housing policy, so this book may have been one that was always going to pique your interest.

But what in particular made it stand out as a contender for our Wonks’ List?

Elizabeth Baldwin: There’s been no shortage of books and media articles about the housing crisis over the last few years here and overseas, so you could be forgiven for almost walking right by this one. I know I nearly did. But what’s great about this collection of essays is it brings kind of a deeper look at the housing crisis.

A lot of the coverage a lot of the popular books about housing are really concerned with kind of the symptoms of it, like the, the ups and downs, mostly ups, unfortunately, of rent and house price indexes, you know, the tenant horror stories pros and cons of, you know, fandangled kind of solutions. But this book abstracts away from, those immediate symptoms and it explores why it is that we’re in this situation, why it is that we’re not building enough homes and the political and social institutions that stand in the way of solving this crisis.

Nick Parkinson: So, if that’s, you know, Demsas diagnosis of the challenge, what’s proposed as a cure in the book?

Elizabeth Baldwin: Well, she really makes the case that a lot of the issues stem from the way we’ve kind of designed the political and democratic institutions that make a lot of important decisions in the housing market. So, as we know, a lot of the key planning and development decisions are at pretty local levels, you know, in the U S at the realm of planning boards and council chambers and similarly, often the purview of local governments here.

And she points out that, you know, while a lot of these processes can seem really democratic, you know, giving communities the opportunity to, object to developments on their street or raise concerns, participate in those processes, that process is actually undemocratic in some ways in that it only allows a very small selection of voices to be heard people who have the time and wherewithal to show up to community meetings and lodge objections, which may not be representative of the community as a whole. People who have families or jobs or other commitments that limit their time to do that.

And of course, as well, the interests of people who might have moved to an area had cheaper housing been available are certainly not represented in the current composition of that area. And Nick, we’re seeing some states in Australia taking steps in the direction of, addressing this problem and bringing planning decisions, up to a level that allows a wider range of voices to be heard, but there’s still a long way to go.

And this book really eloquently makes the case for continuing that journey. And Nick, talking about homes, our next selection on the Wonks’ List is a pair of papers on working from home. What were these ones about?

Nick Parkinson: That’s right, Liz. These papers they really bring us to a point that we’ve needed for some time, which is putting some evidence on the table about what are the pros and cons of the environment in which we find ourselves now in work, which is where, in many cases, people are moving either to purely remote work or hybrid work.

It’s been a few years now since I remember being at home and not having, not really having that option. And when we were coming back into the office, there was a lot of debate, claims and counterclaims about, you know, what are the optimal number of days to be in the office? It’s nice to finally have some empirical data that we can point to about how does productivity change when you move from working alongside people in the flesh to doing so via the web?

Elizabeth Baldwin: So, what have we learned?

Nick Parkinson: Well, the first paper is a really interesting one. It’s one of those things where you read and you think, oh, gosh, the researchers, they found the perfect case for it. And it’s about workers productivity and promotion prospects using data from a software engineering firm. Now, this is a great setting to test theories on remote work because workers’ productivity it’s really able to be measured in code written, and mentorship is also able to be measured in comments received or given. Now, mentorship is something that comes up quite a while when we talk about what are maybe some of the cons of working remotely. Do you get, for example, less feedback because you’re not simply sitting next to the person and able to wander over to their desk.

Well, what this paper finds is that in person work actually facilitates investment in workers’ skills for tomorrow but diminishes productivity today. So, they found that junior engineers get more feedback when working in the office, and ask more follow up questions too, than engineers working remotely.

And this in the long term, it boosts their skills and leads to pay rises down the track. But there are some trade-offs because there are productivity costs in the short term. So, there was less volume of code written in the short term, particularly for those senior engineers who might’ve had mentoring responsibilities.

Elizabeth Baldwin: I was also particularly interested in this paper in the author’s findings around how gender interacted with those effects. They had a look, and they found that both of those effects that you mentioned were even stronger for women.

So, as you said, Nick, the junior engineers who were sitting near their teammates, received way more feedback than junior engineers who were remote. And the size of that effect was much bigger for junior women than junior men. And they were even able to kind of dig into the, the nature of that effect. And they found it was because women were asking more follow up questions in person than they felt comfortable doing online.

But then on the other hand, senior female engineers tend to shoulder more of the mentoring burden than senior male engineers. So, their productivity increased way more when they were at home. So, you kind of have these junior female engineers benefiting a lot more from being in the office and more senior female engineers benefiting a lot more from being at home.

And I think this is just a really interesting example of how, you know, kind of changes in technology and work practices aren’t just this like, you know, a uniform thing that applies evenly across the population. You know, they’re overlaid on top of our existing kind of social norms and practices and can lead to these really divergent effects.

Which I know is also a theme of the second paper you wanted to talk about on working from home.

Nick Parkinson: Yeah, you’re right. The second paper does look at these kind of subpopulation groups and what, how working from home is different depending on who you are and the circumstances in which you might find yourself. So, this paper looks at two big surveys in the US, the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey.

And through those surveys, it investigates the impact of working arrangements on employee rates for people with a disability. One of the things that came about as a hypothesis during the pandemic was that more remote work might enable people, particularly those with access needs, to participate more fully in the workforce.

The good news in this paper is it found that employment rates for people with a disability did indeed increase during that period of remote work from 2019 in particular through to 2024. It increased more so in occupations where it is relatively easy to work from home, such as software engineers, but it had little change in occupations where there’s more need for in person work like teachers.

And so together, these two papers, as you mentioned, they really challenge those one size fits all narratives that we sometimes have about remote work. They remind us that the benefits and costs, they’re not evenly spread across the working population.

Elizabeth Baldwin: Yeah. And on the topic of inclusion, Nick, that was also a big theme of our third pick for the wonks list, belonging without othering. And this one looked at the idea of othering the term they use to describe, you know, the creation of in groups and out groups in society. It uses a lot of case studies from across the globe and shows us how a well-intended focus on single identity markers can divide us more than bind us. So, Nick, tell us why this one made the cut.

Nick Parkinson: This one was a recommendation from a Grattanite who felt it was a really timely read in an increasingly fractured world. And it tackles, as you mentioned, this fascinating social puzzle. So, we live in an age where people are desperately seeking connection. We’ve heard politicians and academics talk about a loneliness epidemic.

I know that for me, sometimes I was at the barber just the other week and I thought to myself, I’m walking out, gee, it’s rare that I’m in kind of circumstances where I’m interacting with people from all walks of life. And have we lost that?

And this is really what the authors, kind of tackle, they look at this phenomenon where despite this desire for connection, we seem to increasingly be building higher walls between ourselves and others. It asks, why are we doing this and how do we stop? And the book made the cut because of the way that the authors go about investigating this question.

They turn to different fields from history through to evolutionary science and psychology. And in bringing that all together, they’ve formed this really helpful reference work for those working in policy and thinking about the way policy interacts with people’s, I guess, sense of identity and in the way that groups interact with policy too.

Elizabeth Baldwin: So, what did I find about why this kind of paradox of polarization persists?

Nick Parkinson: What they find is that our very attempts to create belonging often rely on a definition of who doesn’t belong. So, it’s that whole, to create an us, we needed them mindset. They point to lots of contemporary and historical examples of this from ethno nationalism, where citizenship is defined in very narrow terms, through to social movements, where we might be inadvertently creating new forms of exclusion while fighting for inclusion.

And that’s really what the first half of the book is dedicated to.

Elizabeth Baldwin: So, is it all problem diagnosis, Nick, or did the authors have any solutions for this pickle?

Nick Parkinson: Oh, they do have a solution, Liz. It’s not all doom and gloom in there. And the second half of the book really offers a way forwards. So, they talk about the idea of belonging beyond just belonging to a single shared identity. And they advocate for what one might call a broader we. This is a hopeful note to end on, and they point to some, some examples from history and from the current moment where communities have been formed that transcended previous divisions and have created a more shared sense of connection and a shared sense of kinship too.

So, our next read, Why Politicians Lie About Trade, has had several avid readers at Grattan. In fact, I know one of our colleagues picked it up over Christmas, which I thought was oh, a trade book over Christmas. What are you doing? Why has this one been so popular and why did it make our list?

Elizabeth Baldwin: It’s a pretty tough ask to make trade policy fun. As you say, it’s not normally what you’d turn to for your light summer reading, but this impressive book manages to get there. It’s written by Dmitry Grozoubinski, a former Australian diplomat and trade negotiator. I really like this one because it’s a useful primer for general readers on the basics of trade policy. You know, the kind of overwhelming acronym soup and the esoteric rules and institutions that you’ve probably seen a headline about and kind of skimmed over, but that are really crucial to the mechanisms of how trade negotiations happen and how agreements are made. We often have these discussions that, you know, a pretty astronomic distance, you know, signing this free trade agreement will increase GDP by so many thousand billion dollars or slapping these tariffs on will create, you know, a hundred thousand jobs in such and such electorate.

And this book really helps to bring some of those claims back down to earth in a really accessible way. Highly recommended.

Nick Parkinson: Sounds like one I’ll have to pick up, Liz. It’s a really useful primer. So last on the list are a pair of economic papers on violence against women. And Liz, these are the ones that you really pushed for to be on the list. Why did you think they were so important to be included?

Elizabeth Baldwin: Yeah, I sure did, Nick. These are two I think really impressive papers from the same set of authors. They drew on some really rich data from Finland that linked kind of admin data, so things like people’s tax, employment, and household records, with police reports of violence. both at home and violence in the workplace.

And this meant that they could overcome, you know, some of the challenges that we often face in surveys and qualitative work of only getting a snapshot in time of people’s experiences of violence or being kind of limited by quite small sample sizes, less able to really draw you know pull together a comprehensive understanding of the patterns of these violence.

Nick Parkinson: What did the authors find?

Elizabeth Baldwin: Well, the first paper focused on violence and abuse at home, and because of this novel data set I mentioned, they were able to kind of trace back years from the point at which a police report of violence was made, and they found that the economic abuse starts much earlier than that physical abuse might become apparent.

So, women’s employment and earnings drop as soon as they start living with a partner who will end up being violent, even if no physical violence is reported until years later. And the researchers also traced how those same violent men behaved in other relationships.

And they found that other women, other partners that those men had had through their lives, also experienced a decline in their economic outcomes. So, the same drops in employment and earnings even if they themselves never reported physical violence. So, it suggests that you know, there are really clear patterns here and big opportunities to kind of identify and disrupt these facets of abuse much earlier than, you know, the, the kind of acute police reports that we might see.

Nick Parkinson: So that first paper has found some really interesting and disturbing trends in what’s happening within the household. What about the second paper which focused on findings of violence at work?

Elizabeth Baldwin: Yeah, this paper kind of traced the other way. It took as a starting point, you know, and a report of an incidence of violence at work. And then it tracked what happens to the careers of victims and perpetrators of that violence.

And it found that men who are violent to their colleagues experience a seven-percentage point decline in their employment. The effect for their female victims was actually bigger. They experienced a nine-percentage point drop in their employment. And those effects lasted for years, at least five years in the data that the researchers were able to draw on. So not only are those effects, you know, really large and persistent for the victims of violence, but they also ripple out across the workplace. So, an incidence of violence in a particular firm typically leads to a decrease in all women’s employment at that firm.

And this is both because some women leave. And also, fewer women are hired in subsequent hiring rounds. So, it, it has these like really significant cultural effects across the whole workplace. But interestingly, that effect is only seen in firms that have a lot of male leaders. In female managed firms, there’s no broader effect on the workforce and the consequences for perpetrators are more severe.

Which I think it speaks to the idea that, you know, these patterns that we’re describing are not inevitable. They are the, the result of decisions made. And again, there’s kind of the potential to disrupt some of those patterns.

Nick Parkinson: And if you or anyone you know needs support on advice or domestic violence, you can call 1 800 RESPECT. That wraps it up for today. It’s been such a pleasure, Liz, talking to you about our Wonks List. I am really looking forward to those who are listening, reading them, letting us know what their nerdiest picks of the year would have been.

You can find all of Grattan’s work freely available online, and it’s supported through the generous donations of people like yourself. Head over to Grattan Institute’s website at grattan.edu.au.

Thanks again for joining us and tuning in and take care.