To accompany Grattan Institute’s annual Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List, our staff curate a selection of some of the year’s best technical reads for policy enthusiasts.
Here are our 2025 selections.
Why Nothing Works: Who killed progress – and how to bring it back
Marc J. Dunkelman
Among policy wonks, 2025 was the year of ‘abundance’. As governments around Australia grappled with how to build more homes and boost our lagging productivity growth, many turned to the best-selling book Abundance, by US journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. But Marc Dunkleman’s book Why Nothing Works, which largely slipped beneath the radar, offers perhaps the sharpest diagnosis of why modern democracies are struggling to build.
Dunkelman traces the history of progressive policymaking in the US. For decades after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, progressivism meant a bigger, more decisive government, from the Tennessee Valley Authority to an expanded Social Security administration.
But after the political upheavals of the 1960s, reformers soured on centralised institutions. Rather than empowering government, they sought to constrain it: inserting guardrails, expanding review processes, and elevating voices opposed change. The result is predictable paralysis. A regulatory state that was designed to protect the public good all too often struggles to create it.
Dunkelman argues that there’s no path back to an era of unchecked government authority. But continuing to ‘warm the tires’ by stepping on both the brake and accelerator isn’t working either. These are the trade-offs that Australian policymakers will have to grapple with as they try to create a ‘government that builds’.
Read Marc Dunkelman’s essay in the Atlantic
The Price Children Pay for Exclusive Suburbs
Katie Roberts-Hull
In the face of ever-higher house prices and rents, Australian families are increasingly being pushed out of cities’ inner suburbs. As Katie Roberts-Hull argues in this essay, this isn’t just a housing problem, it’s also a problem for educational equity.
Research shows that children of low-income families are more likely to succeed in neighbourhoods that have a mix of incomes. Yet by limiting the housing that can be built in the places people most want to live, Australia’s planning systems have historically concentrated disadvantage in our outer suburbs.
Roberts-Hull documents the consequences: Elevation Secondary College on Melbourne’s northern fringe struggles with rapid growth and isolation, even as some inner-city schools face closure from under-enrolment. Meanwhile, efforts to build new schools in fast-growing areas often face fierce NIMBY resistance.
A timely reminder that when our cities break apart, it’s the youngest and poorest Australians who have the most to lose.
Read the essay in Inflection Points
The Male Complaint: The manosphere and misogyny online
Simon James Copland
As influencers such as Andrew Tate have attracted headlines and followers over the past few years, public attention has increasingly turned to the ‘manosphere’ – the loose collection of online spaces united by their misogyny and opposition to feminism. Concerns about the harms caused by these online spaces have been a driving factor behind the push toward social media regulation, including Australia’s under-16s ban.
To steal a phrase that was once applied to Donald Trump (one of the manosphere’s other famous figureheads), Copland’s book takes the manosphere seriously but not literally. His analysis delves beneath the catchphrases and rallying cries to reveal the cruel logic at the heart of these spaces, that channel the experiences of their members into shame and anger. The promise of community the manosphere offers young men is all too often an illusion, replaced instead by ‘networks’ built on transactional relationships and self-help ideologies. Copland’s work challenges us to confront the banality of the manosphere’s misogyny, and charts its ties to a long history of gendered violence. The Male Complaint is an important read for those looking to understand the rise and grip of online extremism.
Two papers using Australian administrative data
The recent explosion in the availability of administrative data has enabled novel research that answers new questions and challenges existing beliefs. These two papers are great examples.
The first looks at the economic and mental health burdens of IVF treatment and involuntary childlessness. Compared to women who successfully conceive, those who do not have worse mental health. Though their incomes are higher (because they avoid the child penalty), they still take a hit, thanks to the costs of IVF treatment.
The second paper uses Medicare and Census data to figure out why mental healthcare use varies so much between regions. It turns out that differences in patient demand and need aren’t the main reason – it’s actually more to do with inadequate supply of those services in low-use regions.
By using administrative data, these two papers contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of issues in their respective policy areas. A richer evidence base should lead to better policy decisions, and hopefully, better lives for all Australians.
Read the papers:
- Regional variation in mental healthcare utilization and suicide: Evidence from movers in Australia by Karinna Saxby, Thomas Buchmueller, Sonja C. de New, and Dennis Petrie.
- Career, Family, and IVF: The impact of involuntary childlessness and fertility treatment by Fabio I. Martinenghi and Maryam Naghsh-Nejad.
Two papers with novel identification strategies
Do you want the good news or the good news? Policies often have unintended effects. These two papers use clever research designs to shed light on some happy spillovers.
The first looks at the shingles vaccine. In Wales, the vaccine was rolled out in 2013 – but only for people younger than 80. This meant people born before 2 September 1933 were never eligible for the vaccine, while those born just a few days later could get the shot.
Those who got the vaccine were less likely to get shingles. And the happy surprise? People who got the vaccine were about 20 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with dementia seven years later. Scientists are still working out exactly why, but it could be due to avoided or less-severe infections, or increased immune system stimulation, or both.
The second paper shows that electric vehicles might have immediate health benefits, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the US, people who live near a charging station are more likely to buy an EV. In areas close to charging stations, levels of nitrogen dioxide fell. And those areas had fewer premature babies and fewer asthma-related ED visits for children under 5.
These fascinating papers highlight the value of research that convincingly join the dots between a cause and an unintended effect. Even better when it’s a health win.
Read the papers:
- Clean rides, healthy lives: The impact of electric vehicle adoption on air quality and infant health, by Cavit Baran, Janet Currie, Bahadir Dursun, and Erdal Tekin.
- A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia, by Markus Eyting, Min Xie, Felix Michalik, Simon Heß, Seunghun Chung, and Pascal Geldsetzer.