The ubiquity of data has lowered the costs of research such as randomised controlled trials.Credit:Brian A. Jackson
A century earlier,such adherence to rigour and data would have been unthinkable. As one commentator notes,before there was evidence-based medicine,we had thousands of years of"eminence-based medicine".
Today,the challenge is to make public policy more scientific. Not only have researchers shown the power of randomised trials,ubiquitous data has lowered the cost of careful public-policy research. InRandomistas:How radical researchers changed our world,I described how governments from New Zealand to the Netherlands are adopting a"what works"philosophy. Rather than muddle through with glib slogans and prejudiced beliefs,the strategy is to focus on building a better feedback loop. As the British Cabinet Office summed it up:"Test. Learn. Adapt."
That's why a Shorten Labor government will establish an evaluator-general in the Treasury,tasked with carrying out high-quality evaluations across government. From taxation to social policy,good evaluation allows us to scale up the most effective programs and close down those that don't work. The evaluator-general would receive funding of $5 million a year,allowing it to significantly boost the volume of randomised trials in the federal government.
Labor's evaluator-general complements our evidence institute for schools,modelled on the successful examples of the US's What Works Clearinghouse and Britain's Education Endowment Foundation. As Tanya Plibersek puts it,the evidence institute will"put an end to decades of ideological battles about school education"and"take politics out of the classroom".
In the early-20th century,Australia was known as 'the social laboratory of the world'.
In other areas,experts have called for more rigorous evaluations. When the Productivity Commission convened a roundtable discussion on the evaluation of Indigenous programs,one expert pointed to the problem of"a litany of poor policies being recycled". In respectful collaboration,better evaluation has the potential to improve Indigenous Australians'lives. In itsShifting the Dial report,the Productivity Commission made quality evaluation (and more randomised trials) one of its top governance reforms.
The randomised approach is already spreading rapidly in business. Netflix,Coles,United Airlines,Amazon and Google have built randomised trials into their corporate model. Intuit founder Scott Cook aims to create a company that's"buzzing with experiments". Whatever happens,Cook tells his staff"you're doing right because you've created evidence,which is better than anyone's intuition". If you used the internet today,it's likely you were part of a randomised trial.