<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1" SRC="http://images.ads.fairfax.com.au/cui/SMH.js"></SCRIPT>

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1" SRC="http://campaigns.f2.com.au/js.ng/cat=news&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&subcat=opinion&site=smh&adspace=468x60">
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
<A HREF="http://campaigns.f2.com.au/click.ng/cat=news&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&subcat=opinion&site=smh&adspace=468x60">
<IMG SRC="http://campaigns.f2.com.au/image.ng/cat=news&ctype=story&Params.richmedia=yes&subcat=opinion&site=smh&adspace=468x60" HEIGHT="60" WIDTH="468" BORDER="0">
</A>
</NOSCRIPT>

Home   >   Opinion
>   Article

national

world

opinion
letters
editorial
cartoon

business

technology

sport

entertainment

multimedia

classifieds

jobs
property
cars

place
an ad

extra
personal finance
travel
education

subscribe
home
delivery
eNewsletter

archives

today's edition: am

past 10
days

site
guide

Policy improves by putting rhetoric on trial

March 5 2003

Ideas should be driven by experiments and hard facts, not
opinion polls, argue Andrew Leigh and Justin Wolfers.

One of the new mantras among policy wonks has been "evidence-based
policymaking" - the notion that policy ideas should stand or fall on the
basis of research and trials, rather than opinion polling and
supposition.

Overseas, this has led to some startling discoveries. Education
programs for young drivers, once thought to reduce road deaths, turned out
to increase them - by encouraging high school students to drive at a
younger age. A US program that provided housing vouchers for poor people
to move out of ghettos dramatically improved the health of children. And
studies on class sizes have cast doubt on earlier assertions that
across-the-board reductions boost students' test scores.

The lesson is that policies, like medical interventions, can be put to
the test, saving millions of taxpayer dollars and improving the quality of
government. To be effective, evidence-based policymaking relies on policy
trials, which simulate the randomised conditions of a laboratory
experiment and give access to high quality data. Unfortunately, both are
largely absent in Australia.

As the NSW election campaign has shown, politicians are about as ready
to engage with policy trials as with red-headed fishmongers migrating in
from the north. The parties, it seems, are big on rhetoric, but not on
putting their ideas to the test.

If the Coalition believes that Parenting Partnerships will reduce
conflict in schools, they should propose a one-year experiment - randomly
implementing them in 100 schools and reporting on whether schools with
partnerships have better test scores and retention rates. If the Greens
believe that dispensing heroin is the way to go, they should suggest
comparing the outcomes of a group of addicts eligible for it with a group
who are not. And instead of watching incarceration rates skyrocket, Labor
could trial and test training and rehabilitation policies in different
jails, to see which does best at helping ex-cons find jobs.

");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

The only example of evidence-based policymaking that we are aware of in
NSW was last year's drug court evaluation. Carefully administered, the
research has produced powerful evidence that the court provides a more
cost-effective solution than the traditional judicial system.

Why don't we see more randomised trials in Australia? One impediment is
a cultural attitude that government services are an entitlement, and
therefore must not be rationed. Yet it is time this conventional wisdom
was balanced against the benefits that can flow from careful pre-testing
of government programs.

Even as Australians have started to embrace testing, our institutions
have failed to follow, denying access to data or imposing hefty fees. By
contrast, US statistics bureaus apply a simple rule: if the public
answered the questions, the public has the right to analyse the data. And
these inputs sustain a proliferation of think tanks that debate policies
based on outcomes, rather than conjecture.

But in Australia, the picture is transformed. The Australian Bureau of
Statistics makes virtually no data of any complexity freely available.
Vast stores of intriguing data are aggregated into bland facts for
publication in the yearbook, rather than released for primary analysis.
When researchers cannot track individual education, health, crime and
labour market experiences, we lose the ability to make subtle judgements
about policy effectiveness.

Charging for statistical data is a policy that is hard to rationalise.
Simple economics tells us the price that should be charged for "public
goods" - such as clean air, street lighting, or national defence - is
zero, otherwise these public resources will be underused. In the case of
data, there is an extra public benefit: good research leads to better
public policy.

Hence we offer this twin challenge: first, Australia's federal
politicians should commit to providing the ABS with the $7 million
required to abolish data access fees, and commit to opening up the
databanks. Second, policy proposals should be subject to random trials
before being funded. The cost of policy mistakes is surely greater than
that of small-scale random trials. And NSW should take the lead.

To those who don't sign on, we say: "chicken". One can barely disagree
on cost grounds. Rather, the fear must be that with real evidence, voters
might discover that reality does not match political rhetoric.

Andrew Leigh is a fellow at the Wiener Centre for Social Policy,
Harvard University. Dr Justin Wolfers is an assistant professor of
economics at Stanford Business School.

Printer
friendly version        Email
to a friend

SEARCH ALL FAIRFAX
ARCHIVES (*Fee for full
article)

Also in Opinion

How the ups can get you down

A gentle friend for a quarter of a century

Costing trickle-down democracy

Policy improves by putting rhetoric
on trial

Take your partners for the twostep, foot-stomp stagger

text | handheld (how to)

membership | conditions | privacy
Copyright
© 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.

advertise |
contact us