A depressing NZAE keynote

Auckland University of Technology’s Professor Rhema Vaithianathan's keynote at the NZAE meetings was depressing. 

Her work is great: better data tools to help child protection workers better triage cases. One result: a one-third reduction in child hospitalisation. 

What's depressing is that it could have been happening here, but the New Zealand government chased the work away. 

I covered it in my column over in the Post; unfortunately, some snafu on their side resulted in a short version in print. The online version has all of it; ungated here. 

I also summarised it in our Insights newsletter:

The New Zealand Economics Association annual meetings are a great way of keeping abreast of what the country’s economists are working on. 

And sometimes they’re downright depressing. 

At last week’s meetings, Auckland University of Technology’s Professor Rhema Vaithianathan’s keynote explained what she’s been up to over the past decade. 

Her team has been helping American child protection services to do a better job protecting kids.  

Child protection work is grim. Officials balance two terrible kinds of errors.  

Over-zealousness means a lot of families will be put through a painful wringer unnecessarily. But under-intervention means some kids who could have been helped will wind up abused, hospitalised, or killed.  

Unless you can find a way of reducing both types of errors. 

And Prof Vaithianathan’s team found a good one. 

Child protection workers have a mountain of administrative data for making decisions on whether to intervene in response to a call, but only about ten minutes to make each decision – then on to the next case.  

It is impossible to regularly make good decisions faced with that much complexity and that little time. 

Prof Vaithianathan’s team reduced complexity by turning data into a predictive score laying out the risk each case posed, to help child protection workers make the right call.  

They started the U.S. work in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, because Allegheny wanted to use data to make better decisions. The programme’s success inspired others to try it out.  

And a later randomised control trial showed that the system reduced child hospitalisation by a third.  

It also reduced the bias that case workers otherwise bring with them in making assessments. The risk scored meant more high-risk white families received help and fewer low-risk black families had to deal with child protection services. 

It’s a great story.  

The depressing part?  

The work started here in New Zealand. It was killed by Anne Tolley as Minister, who described it as experimenting on kids. And the subsequent Labour government showed even less interest in data-based approaches.  

One third fewer hospitalisations for children in risky families.  

But not here.  

In America instead.  

Thanks to Kiwi researchers, who were chased away from doing the work here.  

An innovative American county can try something new and let others follow. New Zealand’s centralisation means a single bad Ministerial decision can cause a lot of harm for a very long time. 

Far better policy, and outcomes, are possible. Even here. But voters have to demand it. 

I also had a two-part podcast with Prof Vaithianathan about it (Part 1, Part 2).

I take all of it as exemplar of why centralised systems fail relative to decentralised ones.

In New Zealand, MSD botched its handling of the system, leading a risk-averse Minister to kill it.

That kills it for the whole country. 

In the US, all you have to do is find one county that isn't full of freaking idiots. When you find that one county, demonstrate that your idea works. Second-movers pick it up, showing that it can work in other places. And then others follow along. 

And every trend in NZ has been toward greater centralisation.