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 2024 selections.
On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy
Jerusalem Demsas
As house prices and rents have skyrocketed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jerusalem Demsas has rapidly become one of the leading authorities on the causes of this housing crisis.
For decades, local governments across the western world have sought to protect the ‘character’ of neighbourhoods by placing onerous restrictions on new home-building. The result has been a shortage of well-located homes in some of the world’s most prosperous cities, from London, to San Francisco, to Sydney.
In this collection of essays, Demsas portrays this policy failure not only as an issue of affordability, but as a challenge to our democracy.
By drawing on academic research and individual stories in equal measure, she interrogates widespread assumptions around what ‘good’ urban planning looks like, and who gets to decide what gets built where in our cities.
Ultimately, Demsas makes the case for pulling the politics of land – and the housing that’s built on it – out of the realm of planning boards and council chambers, and placing it at the centre of our democratic debate. This collection is an essential read for anyone who cares about housing policy and the future of local democracy.
Why Politicians Lie About Trade
Dmitry Grouzoubinski
Trade policy may not be your idea of a riveting read – it’s probably one of those things you’re content to ignore even while choosing between a Chinese or Japanese car, ordering your Christmas presents online from the US, or complaining about your gas bill rising because of high international LNG prices.
But trade policy has moved to the centre of political debates globally this past decade – from Brexit to Trump’s tariffs.
Politicians of all stripes have the unfortunate habit of making inflated claims about billions of dollars in benefits – or costs – from trade policy changes.
Luckily, Dmitry Grouzoubinski is here to help you understand the basics and ask the right questions. His book walks through the fundamentals of trade policy, from why we have it and what it does, to trade in goods and services, free-trade agreements, and the WTO. It explains the impact of trade on jobs, national security, climate change, and more.
Why Politicians Lie About Trade is written in clear and accessible language, with lots of examples and a good dose of humour. By the end, you’ll be better equipped to understand trade’s role in key policy debates, and ready to spot dodgy arguments. What more could you want in an election year?
Belonging without Othering
john a. powell and Stephen Menendian
Social trust is the glue that holds societies together, so how should societies and institutions respond when trust is in decline globally and the world is becoming increasingly fragmented? Belonging without Othering offers up a hopeful and constructive path forward.
We all seek belonging, connection, and community, but the damaging truth is that societies often create belonging and forge identities for some by alienating others. Authors john a. powell and Stephen Menendian articulate the mechanisms and consequences of ‘othering’ and present a framework for building belonging without othering.
We must acknowledge each other’s humanity even in our disagreement. As the authors argue: ‘most of us share at least a few of the same social identities. If we embrace rather than supress our multiplicities we can build bridges’.
But ultimately this book is less about what individuals can do and more about what institutions must do. Our leaders and institutions need to generate and inspire social trust, rather than erode it. This book calls for ‘a new set of institutions, narratives, and stories about ourselves that are strong enough to weave our peoples together and create belonging’. And more importantly, it shows us how.
A pair of papers on the working from home experiment
Debates about the productivity impact of hybrid work often devolve into fact-free polemics. As organisations including Dell, Flight Centre, and the NSW Government push for their staff to return to the office, two new studies cut through the speculation with hard data.
The first examines how work arrangements affect workers’ productivity and prospects. It uses rich data from a software engineering firm: a great setting to test theories on remote work, because workers’ productivity (code written) and mentorship (comments received or given) are readily measurable.
It finds that in-person work facilitates investment in workers’ skills for tomorrow but diminishes productivity today. Junior engineers get more feedback when in the office and ask more follow-up questions than engineers working remotely. This ultimately boosts their skills, leading to pay raises down the track. But it imposes productivity costs in the short term, particularly for senior engineers and women, who are more likely to shoulder mentoring responsibilities.
The second paper analyses the broader social effects of the increase in remote work. It finds that the increasing availability of remote work has opened up new opportunities for people with disability. Employment rates for people with disability increased a lot between 2019 and 2024, but only in occupations where it is relatively easy to work from home (such as software engineers), with little change in occupations that must be done in person (like teachers).
Together, these papers challenge one-size-fits-all narratives about remote work, and remind us that the benefits and costs are not evenly spread across the population.
Read the papers
- The power of proximity to coworkers: training for tomorrow or productivity today? By Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais
- Work from home and disability employment, by Nicholas Bloom, Gordon B. Dahl, and Dan-Olof Rooth.
A pair of papers on violence against women
Violence against women often tips into the spotlight because of single, horrific incidents. But two articles this year, drawing on Finnish population data linked to police reports, show that violence casts a shadow over years of women’s lives.
The first paper examines abuse at home, highlighting the tightly knotted connections between economic and physical abuse. 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 other women who live with that same abusive man experience a decline in their economic outcomes, even if they themselves never report physical violence.
The second paper focuses on violence at work. Men who are violent to colleagues experience declines in employment – but their female victims experience larger employment drops. The effects last for years.
These outcomes aren’t inevitable: the management of firms makes a big difference. In male-managed firms, an incident of violence leads to a decrease in female employment across the board. But in female-managed firms, there’s no broader effect on the workforce, and the consequences for perpetrators are more severe.
Research of this type may soon be possible in Australia, because justice data will be linked to Australia’s population dataset, PLIDA. These Finnish papers highlight what an enormous opportunity this will provide to identify, and ultimately disrupt, patterns of violence against women.
Read the papers
- The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships, by Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang
- Violence against Women at Work, by Abi Adams-Prassl, Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang