What role does economics play in the cultural and creative industries?

Tandi is joined by PwC’s Chief Economist Jeremy Thorpe for a frank chat about policy and funding. During this episode we cover topics such as how cost-benefit analysis assists with decision making, how economists measure benefit, what “lobbynomics” is, and the power of specialisation in a technology-driven world.

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Guests

Jeremy Thorpe

Jeremy Thorpe is PwC's Chief Economist in Australia and a Partner in its national Economics & Policy team.

With more than two decades of experience, Jeremy’s experience spans a range of diverse area including: cost-benefit analysis, the valuation of the economic contributions of companies, industries, not-for-profits and specific activities, the economics of copyright and reviews of government programs and regulatory changes.

Jeremy also serves on the board of Flourish Australia. Flourish Australia works in local communities to help people on their mental health recovery journey.

Previously, Jeremy was the Chairman of the not-for-profit, Viscopy. For a decade he was also Director of a leading Australian-owned consulting firm. Prior to this, Jeremy was economist with Australia’s Department of Treasury and the Productivity Commission.

Key points

This episode covers:

  • How cost benefit analysis differs from impact analysis and why cost benefit analysis helps people make better decisions

  • Why economics the best way for Treasuries to measure benefit compared to social research or qualitative research

  • “Lobbynomics” and how economic analysis is used in lobbying and advocacy to recast an organisation’s narrative

  • Why it’s tempting to try and show how big your impact is - and where a smaller number might be more effective

  • How to appeal to the bureaucratic heart and the political heart in order to advocate effectively

  • What the current constrained economic environment means for the arts

  • Why technology is now at the core of every challenge

  • Why consumer demand for experiences rather than material goods has affected the market

  • How a more globalised world can result in government choosing to consolidate funding in the culture and creative sector

  • The power of specilisation in showing defined value and how that can assist with funding.

Links

Key resources mentioned in the episode:

 

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Transcript

Tandi:                      Welcome to the podcast.

Jeremy Thorpe:   Thanks for having me on.

Tandi:                       Jeremy, you and I met when I was an employee of PWC some years ago now. I think I left in 2010.

Jeremy Thorpe:   A long time ago.

Tandi:                       It's great to catch up with you and have you on to talk about all things economics and policy. Tell us a little bit about your career and what sparked your interest in economics and policy, and I know you have a particular interest in the creative industries as well, and have done a lot of work in the field over time, but tell us how it all started.

Jeremy Thorpe:   When I was in year nine in high school, I said, "I want to be an economist." I read the paper every day, and economics was the language of decision making. That has always interested me. I went through university and did an economics degree, but also did a law degree, and I was fascinated at that junction of the law and economics as a combination, and moved to Canberra in Australia to start my career as a professional economist, and lucked into an organization at that time called The Industry Commission that's now The Productivity Commission. It allowed me a little bit of freedom and to do research and it's rare in government. And one of the things I started doing was around the intersection of copyright and economics. And I think I wrote one of the first pieces in Australia at the time around the law and economics of copyright.

Jeremy Thorpe:    And so that in a sense sparked 20 odd years of various consulting work around copyright. And so that starts to drag in the creative industries. That's been, I think the initial point and it's still a point and I will be releasing later this year through the Australian Copyright Council, an update to the value of Australia's copyright industry. So that has had a 20 year gestation of multiple projects, but that's formed off into a whole lot of other areas into creative work as well around ... Particularly around infrastructure, or I'm trying to value price, various types of activity that might not be seen in a traditional sense.

Tandi:                       In my time at PWC I was employed in the policy and economics team. Tell us a little bit about the firm's offering in regard to policy and economics and exactly what it does.

Jeremy Thorpe:    We've got a team of about a hundred economists and that's where you make your economist jokes now because it seems like a lot of economists. We operate as a national practice, and we do probably 70 odd percent of our work for government in some form or other, a fair bit for not for profits as well. And the private sector makes up the rest, but that fluctuates a little bit. Certainly, a lot of helping governments make decisions, whether that be cost benefit analysis, or some other evaluation process. On the private side, it tends to be around valuing their economic contribution, or what's the activity that they're doing, but how do you measure something beyond the profit and loss statement. So how do they impact in a community sense? So, I think the interesting bit that we play with is it the things that don't fit in the box neatly in anywhere else in the firms. So, we tend to get those really interesting, challenging, unusual projects.

Tandi:                       Can you tell us about some of those? We'd love to hear about some of the more unusual questions you've turned your mind to in the past.

Jeremy Thorpe:    I think typical probably is cost benefit analysis. It's almost a standard tool that we employ. Whether we're looking at valuing or doing ... Undertaking a cost benefit analysis of a museum, a train line, a new frigate, whatever we're particularly looking at. I think that's the part and parcel. Some of the most interesting and challenging things that I've done in my career have been around valuing copyright, particularly in a broadcast sense. How do you value an intangible product, in a negotiation when one party says "It's worth nothing." And the other party says, "It's priceless." How do you come to a bargain to license for a television to broadcast music, or radio to broadcast music? Before I was at PWC, but possibly the most interesting thing in my career, it was what's called the Nightclubs Case in Australia, which was how do you value what nightclubs should pay to play music?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Court case, never been done before in Australia. We had economists versus economists in court, talking about copyright and the impact on nightclubs. It seems very esoteric now, but what we did there in framing up that debate, and how to put a price on it has shaped subsequent ... Shaped the next decade of copyright pricing in Australian courts

Tandi:                       And for the uninitiated cost benefit analysis, what does that mean exactly? What's involved in doing cost benefit analysis?

Jeremy Thorpe:    What we're trying to do is help someone make a decision. What are some options? What are you trying to achieve? What are the options to achieve that? Then let's both identify the costs of the various options to achieve those outcomes, and also the benefits. Costs are normally really easy to identify. You can see it, costs, it's employing someone, it's spending money on something, that's relatively easy, particularly in say it's like cultural industries. The benefits side is the real challenge. What, are you actually doing? Who are you doing it for? How do you put a value on something that you might not price, you might not have a ticket price? How do you put a value on that? So, you're making decisions on a consistent basis, treating the options on a fair but consistent basis, so that the policy maker, or the funder is making the judgment that creates the most value for society.

Tandi:                       You mentioned that that case of nightclubs playing music before. I mean given that culture is to some degree subjective, and different people, like some people like dance music and others don't. I mean, how do you deal with that in trying to measure benefits? The fact that tastes are quite subjective?

Jeremy Thorpe:    The one advantage that simplified the world is we don't charge more for dance music versus country and Western music. Music is music in that sense, but at the core of it was we did a lot of surveying of the public, to understand when they went to a nightclub, what was it that they valued when they went to a nightclub? Now, I may be a little too old now, but the key bit was people pay to go into a high-end nightclub. What are they paying for? They're partly paying for the ambience. They're partly paying for good music. They're partly paying for accessibility, location, a whole range of other attributes.

Jeremy Thorpe:    We went out and asked thousands of people how they valued or how they ranked those various attributes. And there was a big statistical model that sat behind it. We randomize the questions and it's all methodologically very complex, but what it allows us to do is actually put a little value on each of those attributes. So, if you have a better location that's worth a little bit more, if you have worse fit out of the nightclub, that's worth a little bit less. Music was actually the core. People go to nightclubs to listen to music. And so, it really focused people's thinking around, what it is at the nightclub that they valued.

Tandi:                       So why do you think ... Devil's advocate here. Why is economics the best lens at which to look at some of these questions as opposed to say, social research, or qualitative research and what does economics offer that other techniques don't?

Jeremy Thorpe:    First of all, I do think economics is the best, but I don't think it's the only, and I think you've got to view some of this as complimentary to understand the full picture. It's not just about the number, but the beauty of what economics does is it does distil activity down to numbers, so that different things can be considered on a like basis. So, if you just have a qualitative discussion, it makes it hard to say that A is better than B. You have to make choices for policymakers, for funders, for whatever else you're for. At the end of the day, you need to be able to say, "I'm going to go with A." So, what's the basis for A rather than B? Economics gives a framework for making that decision. Bad economics, or incomplete economics isn't necessarily the answer, but we'd like to think that a properly done economic analysis gives you a view of what the right answer is. But it does need to be complemented by a range of other skills, and other research techniques, or philosophies and frameworks as well to really give them a nuanced perspective.

Tandi:                       Let's talk about economic impact. It seems like every week I'm reading another economic impact study. I mean can you talk a little bit about what that technique involves, and what you see its role as in relation to say cost benefit analysis that we've talking about?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Cost benefit analysis at the end of the day is looking at options and trying to treat them the same so you can make a valid judgment between the two. It has a very defined rigorous approach to it, and there are manuals and guidelines, and they're pretty well all consistent and you do it, and you know what you're getting. Impact analysis is less about judgments between the two, but it's trying to have a view as to what an individual project is doing for the community, it sits in and the broader economy as well. Cost benefit analysis tends to be quite focused on the directly affected parties. Impact analysis takes a much broader perspective of the economy, and it captures flow on impacts either because ... Let's give an example. If I was building a ... What are we going to build?

Tandi:                      Let's build this stadium.

Jeremy Thorpe:    We're going to build a stadium just to pick something that's not controversial in new South Wales. When you build a stadium, there are costs to building it, and there's benefits that are captured by the people that attend the stadium. When you're doing an impact analysis, you're also looking at what are the inputs that are used to the stadium? What do the industries that supply those, how are they affected? How are the industries that also maybe use the stadium as an input into their process, whether that be broadcasters, how are they benefited from having a stadium that actually exists as well? So, it's a much more expansive view. In cost benefit analysis, we tend to treat employment as a cost. It is a thing that gets expended. When people think of impact analysis more often than not employment tends to be treated as a benefit, because it's creating jobs and that's seen as a positive.

Jeremy Thorpe:    There's an example where you can get quite different answers, just two different techniques. Both have a place, but I think we need to be careful. Certainly, impact analysis, there's a temptation that it must be the biggest number possible, but what we found, and found quite consistently, is you get in trouble if you overinflate it. People will quickly see through methodologies that just inflate numbers for the sake of inflating numbers, and we've seen it in the press recently where this ... That's been called out. Sometimes it gets called “lobbynomics’”. In other words, an impact analysis because they might generate a bigger number, because it's a broader conception of who's affected. If you add them all up, you get an enormous number. So, there's a degree of almost fatigue by the media, by policy makers for these big numbers. So sometimes bringing it back down to a smaller number, more personal number is a more effective advocacy tool for my client, or for the sector. Then just having a number with billions or trillions attached to it.

Tandi:                       Let's talk now about that lobbynomics tell us about how these kinds of analysis or these techniques are used in lobbying and advocacy, and where you've seen it work well, and perhaps any examples of where it happened.

Jeremy Thorpe:    It tends to be because an organization is trying to recast its narrative, feeling underappreciated for the good work that they do in their space, they're trying to explain the broader space that they sit in. The creation of jobs, the number of people that they attract, the value that they generate for the suppliers to them, and up and down the supply chain. It tends to be used to explain, and as a tool for engaging with policy makers, or funders or decision makers in a different way. We see it actually quite a lot, interestingly now, both in not for profit space, but we even see government doing it itself. Not for profits are competing against governments who are trying to recast their narrative around how they affect the community as well. We effectively have competing stakeholders often in the same environment.

Jeremy Thorpe:    As I said, I think it's worked well when it doesn't ... It is conservative, and it is trying not to be big for big sake. Weighing down with analytic methods, and verbiage equally is a challenge that these tend to get caught up in. In other words, there's what's called the thud test. When I've got my analysis, I throw it on the table, does it make a thud noise 'cause it's really heavy? We're finding that doesn't work really. Stakeholders don't have tons of time to engage. They want to know what you're doing, who it's helping, the value of that. If it doesn't need to be a hundred-page report to do that. It might be through infographics, it might be a 10 page document. So that's important. Personalizing the numbers, I keep coming back to as important.

Jeremy Thorpe:    If you're talking to a minister, a national number means less possibly than maybe the number in their electorate. Personalizing that way. Telling the value that is captured in a broader sense, but through the eyes of an individual, rather than a number with trillions and billions. So, the way that numbers are presented is often more powerful than the analytics that sits behind them. It is telling the story that you need to tell to appeal to that decision maker becomes important.

Tandi:                       In your time you would've observed, an infinite number of policy analysis and changes, and regulatory events. Tell us about some of the work that you've been involved in that you would consider successful, or where you, or the firm has played a role and have some policy change that it's gone all the way through.

Jeremy Thorpe:    This is not me personally, but I think one that our firm has been very proud of is the NDIS, The National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia. It probably has many parents, but certainly the partner at PWC at the time spent a lot of time and effort demonstrating through an actuarial lens that people with disabilities were not being provided the support or the opportunity. And if they could be provided with the appropriate support and opportunity, there's a payoff both from just a quality of life, but in fact there's a payoff from a productivity benefit if people can go back to work even part time. So, telling a story that was traditionally couched as one of lack of care, or the need for more care on a personal level too, but there is an economic benefit as well. Marrying those two was an important bit to get both sides of politics agreeing through the independent arbiter really almost to the productivity commission, as saying, validating the idea and framing it up.

Jeremy Thorpe:    It took a long time, but I think the firm certainly was proud of that as a development, that one of its partners was a key leader in at the time. No policy in big areas happens overnight, and it's rare that you can pin it to one person or one event, but I think that's one that we're very proud of. I think that's an example where numbers were the bit that changed the narrative. And so that's again ... If we're thinking back to the cultural space, it is about being clear on what your narrative is and what's the evidence you want to support that, to reorient it, to give a different lens for different decision makers who may not have been advocates otherwise.

Tandi:                       Interesting. PWC has probably changed quite significantly since I was there. Can you tell us a bit, beyond your team? Obviously, it's a multinational firm that's, serving some clients across the world, right? What are the key trends that the firm is following? Perhaps what are the areas where it's expanding its capacity, or looking at how it can respond to the changing needs of its clients, and governments around the world?

Jeremy Thorpe:    If I look back since your time, there ... Let's even just go back five years, I think the big change that we've seen is that technology is almost at the core of everything that has been done there. Both from a PWC perspective, where we are digitizing our core to use our internal phrase, which is around “how do we work smarter, how do we bring technology to help solve the problems that once may have been labour-intensive, that we can do faster, smarter, and more accurately?” But we see technology as both at the core of almost every challenge that our clients have, because clients are all looking to transform. They're all looking to digitise, they're all looking to use data in a better way.

Jeremy Thorpe:    They're looking for opportunities where technology can provide a new lens into the types of services they're looking at. It's hard to, not even at a policy level, start to talk about what's a technology solution to help solve the problem that we have. Through to where we've always had service delivery - how do we serve with technology at its core in a better way - both in a physical sense and on an online sense. For people outside almost all the major professional services groups.

Jeremy Thorpe:    I don't know if I can reinforce enough, how that is the driver at the moment, both from the private sector perspective where you might just think “of course”, but just as much, if not more, at the public sector level, where being ... Putting the taxpayer or the citizen at the core, we're trying to serve those people better and technology is part of the answer for that. It's not all the answer because at the end of the day just putting in an IT system isn't the answer. It is about designing processes and systems supported by technology that give an experience that customers want, or that people or taxpayers want.

Tandi:                       You've got a really keen eye for observing how government work and certainly in terms of analysing policy. What are some of the things you've observed in the last five or 10 years in terms of how our policy is developed today, and what are some of the successes and challenges of working and with government in today's day and age.

Jeremy Thorpe:    I'm pausing temporarily while I think of how to encapsulate that. In some ways the political process has become faster. It's become sharper. It's certainly more pointed, and I think in different areas in policy, we see different approaches and different outcomes. At its core, government does what it does, and it does the same thing pretty well every year. Really, it's at the margins we are playing with funding requests, needs that bubble up. What I've found, and I'll give you a health example. I've seen many clients who have been very successful at engaging with government over what are very small asks, but making those asks, bite-size has enabled them to come back, and back, and back, and make steps to solving a bigger problem. If they'd gone to government and said, "I need ... insert a very large number here… in the current fiscal environment,” governments are, could never do that.

Jeremy Thorpe:    But give them comfort that something can be achieved in bite-sized pieces, I think has been a remarkably successful, a successful journey. But there's a challenge here and I've certainly seen it with clients. Just appealing to the bureaucratic heart, is probably not enough. Just appealing to the political heart sometimes get you what you want, but probably not enough there. You need to go to both sides of that spectrum, in the sense of there are processes, there are systems, there are expectations that government have, that you need to comply with. It makes life easier to be able to say to the minister, "We've ticked all those boxes." Sometimes you can just appeal to the minister from a political perspective, but more often than not, they're still looking back at the bureaucracy for the sanction or the tick or the, "I know I'm not going to be done by the auditor general when the time comes."

Jeremy Thorpe:    So, people engaging with government need to think of both of those perspectives. Where I see failure more often than not, it is where there's been a blanket, I'm just going to talk to the bureaucrats. There's a process, I'll follow the process and I'll be happy, or I'm just going to lobby the minister or the, elected representatives. There needs to be a balance in this process. It doesn't mean it's 50-50, and it'll vary by the issue and so forth. But I think that to me is where we've seen success, and clearly where we've seen failures when it's been myopic in one way or the other.

Tandi:                       Turning now to the cultural and creative industries what are some of the big issues, and challenges that you've seen and what are your observations of the times that we're in?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Let me put a macro-economics lens on it firstly. Let's think of it from a consumer perspective, don't worry about government funding for the moment, but we see that consumers have over time, absolutely consistently shifted away from buying things, to buying services or buying activities, or buying experiences. The trend is undeniable in the data. That provides, in my mind, hope or opportunity for the cultural industries, because they're selling experiences, they're selling things that are intangible.

Jeremy Thorpe:    The public is more voting with their feet to buy those types of things. These days there's an opportunity. The challenge is obviously in a constrained economic environment where wages growth has been low, people are fighting for that expenditure. So, we're now competing against going out to the theatre, or going out to see a movie, versus staying at home on my third streaming service. So, the debate as to what are the factors pulling in different directions have changed, but in fact that concept of people buying activity entrenched is much stronger than it used to be. So that's an interesting change in my mind in the economic environment.

Jeremy Thorpe:    The challenge is I think though, as we've got a more globalized world, has actually been demonstrating quality. So, where we may have had fragmentation of supply in the creative space, the willingness to put up with that from a consumer or a customer perspective, I think is diminishing that there's ... I've been exposed to, and “insert whether it's better quality music, or better opera, a better play, a better movie through my global accessibility of Netflix, or music services, or whatever channel I have to the globe”…it makes it harder to come back and see a second rate, something put on at my local performing arts centre.

Jeremy Thorpe:    I think we've seen a challenge in that space. But again, people are willing to go out. So, there's a tension there. They're willing to go and spend money and go to performing events. But that tension or inequality means we've seen certainly some consolidation. Government has certainly at times gone towards consolidating funding, supporting excellence rather than everyone gets a little bit of something. So in some ways it's quite a challenge for the business model, and particularly if you have a traditional model which says, "I practiced when I was younger in the local theatre, and I progressed up to something, and I went to neither and I went to somewhere else." If you cut out one of those layers, it makes it maybe more of a challenge for thinking about, "How are we going to grow that next generation?" And the way we need to think of it, and this is training and developing, might need to change as well.

Tandi:                       I mentioned that many of the individuals, and organizations that make up the sector, probably very few of them could afford the firm's services. What kinds of things would you say to perhaps an organization in the small to medium sector that's being faced with increasingly competitive market in terms of reaching audiences, increasingly competitive market in terms of practicing funding, and really struggling to make ends meet. I mean what kinds of things would you advise an organization in that situation to be thinking about, that you know from the point of view of advocating, tell us what goes through your mind when you hear that about that session.

Jeremy Thorpe:    One of the things we always ask and are keen to understand, when we're talking to people is, around who they think they are trying to appeal to. My experience in some community, smaller organizations is it's a bit of trying to appeal to everyone and yet, and in the same way, maybe appealing to no one in any strong way. The things ... My experiences is if clarity as to who your audience is, who your customer is, is really important. If you've got that, you've got a proposition that you can sell in a more targeted way, people are willing to pay more for that specialization. It is also a clearer narrative when saying, "What are my other funding sources?" If I'm saying, "I really want to do a performing arts, and it's going to be focused on developing young people's love for this art form, I'm going to target schools, and we're going to take that as a, as a key growth market. If we can get others, that's all well and good, but that's our target."

Jeremy Thorpe:    That's a clear narrative to then go and talk to an education department, to go and talk to a federal government, to go and talk to a private sector sponsor. If you've got a different target audience, that's fine as well. But if you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, it's harder for someone else to see the defined value in what they're doing. And so, there might only be two or three buyers out there to support you or fund you or sponsor you. But if you've got a stronger proposition, that's a much easier sell. And so, it does come back to this ... Specialization, I think is where we are increasingly driving towards. This is not just in what you do, but who you are doing it for as well.

Tandi:                       Interesting. Where do you see innovation in terms of the techniques that you're using, and how it's being applied to solve the challenges of the next 10 years?

Jeremy Thorpe:    We've always played with data, but it's hard to underestimate the importance of data, both at the concept of big data. There's certainly that as well, and we're seeing that as a phenomenon, but we're still playing in spaces with very little data as well. And so, it's how you deal with the problem of little data, it can be quite a challenge. But undoubtedly, we're applying more sophisticated techniques to a broader range of data and being able to mash together different data sources that would never have been consistently applied. And so that ability to link data sets to what we've talked about, is it's a revealed preference.

Jeremy Thorpe:    In other words, data that might point to the way people actually behave, rather than doing a survey, which is the way they say they might behave. The more that we can link data from actual outcomes ... For example, if you are looking at an event, “can we use mobile phone data now there's privacy issues?” and there's ways that mobile providers can aggregate data so you can't identify individuals or even certain groups. But “can we use data to track, for example, from music festival over a couple of days - when did they come? How long did they spend in the venue versus outside the venue? Did they come in and for a while, and then out and back again? Is it a mechanism for actually saying, "Well they love the music for the first period, but clearly we lost their attention for whatever reason." Using new data sources to try and derive answers for things that we may never have otherwise seen, and that's particularly valuable, say for a music festival didn't sell tickets. If it's one where, how do you put a number of people that came on?

Jeremy Thorpe:    It's, how do you talk to government about, we encouraged 30,000 people to come who would not have otherwise come, and we know that they came from elsewhere because our mobile data can point us to that. So new technology is allowing us to get a new lens that we might, not might, we DID not have into the way that people behave, and makes us able to make judgments around what they were doing and the value of the services provided to them. People jump up and down and may say that the ethics of tracking in that sense but it's not about tracking individuals, but it's understanding almost the mass movement of people and how that flows.

Tandi:                       So given that there's different new sources of data and data's going to play an increasing role in the innovation in all of these different spheres, what are some of the skills and capacities that you think are needed and perhaps the firm is looking to, in terms of making sense of all that data and what are the different skills that we need to be building to really turn all this infinite amounts of data into something that's-

Jeremy Thorpe:   Usable?

Tandi:                      ... tangible and useful. Yes.

Jeremy Thorpe:    I think one is to start with thinking about data at the beginning rather than trying to retroactively afterwards think about data. We do things, we capture data just by doing activities. The more we can plan early on to think about what data we are capturing, what data could we capture, how could we capture it in the most effective way to make it easier to make it usable at the end of the process, I think is absolutely important. We worry about surveys a lot in the cultural space because we don't know actuals. We are trying to find proxies for actuals. Can we find better proxies of actual behaviour that might give us a different lens? It might be complemented by a survey, or you might not even need the survey in that sense, can we use credit card data in a more imaginative way?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Certainly, we've seen examples of that where large events have partnered with credit card providers who've said, we saw spikes in credit card usage and they know where it is in the area buying different types of products which we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. So, it's often about partnering, whether it be with the credit card provider, a telco provider, or a transport provider, or a ... It is thinking about data in a holistic sense. That is not the stuff you necessarily capture in your organization, but you can capture it in a way that can fit with other people's data. That gives you a much broader lens into valuing an activity in a cultural sense.

Tandi:                       All right, well we're going to wrap up soon, but I'd love to just hear a little bit more from you personally in terms of being PWC’s Chief Economist. What kinds of things are you going to be interested in in the coming 12 months to three years? What do you plan?

Jeremy Thorpe:    There's a couple of things and I think that the most exciting one is around digital skills. We've been talking in Australia, but globally around STEM education, and this, we don't have enough of the right skills for the next type of jobs that are coming down the track. We have a sense of what's coming, and we have a sense that they're going to be more technology enabled. This is not about a specialism for specialism sake but infusing what we do in almost every job with a more literate digital and scientific background to it. But we've talked about that in that problem sense of “we know we don't have to train those people”. We're now increasingly starting to talk about, “so how do you train those people?” What's the economic benefit if we can’t actually change the way that people think, and that's not talking just about people at school, in fact it's the exact, almost the exact opposite.

Jeremy Thorpe:    How do you as a decision maker, as a senior person sitting in government, or sitting in the private sector or sitting in a not for profit, how do you commission someone to make the next investment in a technology platform to change the customer service? Do you know the right questions to be asking? Do you know how to value that? How to judge whether it's being effective, or you're just caught in a technology bubble that is technology for technology's sake.

Jeremy Thorpe:    You don't want any of those things, but we need to up-skill people to be able to discuss, plan, buy, integrate technology in a different type of way, as well as training the next generation of scientists. The next generation of cultural leaders who are savvy and have an understanding of the way that data analytics can help that progress. We try to think about the next iteration that is actually around solving what we think is the problem that we all see coming, and how you do that in a practical sense. I'm excited that we're trying to start to solve the problem rather than just bemoan that there is a wave problem. There is again-

Tandi:                       I saw that LinkedIn according to one theme, that creativity is the number one skill that employers look for. How would you consider Australia's creative capacity, and how does creative skills fit in with STEM education in your view?

Jeremy Thorpe:    A lot of what we do is fundamentally around co-designing with clients, and so we hire people specifically because they are creative and can help shape that process. But it has to be part of our everyday job. People are moving because their jobs change, but in fact reinventing yourself, almost has to be at the core of how we are trained. If we are just trained to come out of university or TAFE, and just do that one job in the same way forever, we fail as a country. Now, whether that be in the creative space, whether it be an accountant, whether it be an economist, or whatever else. We have to have embedded in ourselves, as well as I think those STEM capabilities, it has to be embedded with a personal innovation, because we know that our jobs will change. We change, and we need to be reflective of that, and we know that when we hire, we particularly look at the way that people are creative but in a team concept as well. Creativity isn't a sole process effectively, so that personal interaction becomes core as well in their game.

Tandi:                       All right, look, I want to wrap it up, but one thing I'm curious about for those listeners who want to understand more about the market that they're operating in, they want to understand, and monitor how the economy is tracking, for instance. Understand more how that would affect the market that they're in. What are some of the indicators or the media sources that you'd recommend people get on top of and keep an eye on? I know I've seen you on LinkedIn, with some commentary around economic indicators and what kinds of things do people bear in mind?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Look, at the end of the day, it's going to be quite reflective on the individual needs of that organization, it's interesting, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which sounds like a really daggy institution when you just hear it on the radio, but they're reinventing the way that they talk about data. They've got a beta example of their new website coming in. I think they could go have a look at that, because it's not about data. It's about what's the problem we're trying to measure or the indicator on its own. It’s about the criminal justice system and recidivism is the challenge, and it's trying to bring a multiple data lens to it. I think that is the harbinger of things, that they are trying to recast themselves to be problem solvers rather than just providers of data. And so that's a lovely example, I think where we're heading, at least. If you're looking at for macro-economic things, Australia's banks give them away.

Jeremy Thorpe:   They all have economics teams. You can sign up, you can get 20 emails a day from each of the major banks, often thematic and topical, and so if you're just interested in the economy in a classical sense, I think that's certainly a direction to head. I don't think there's any single point that I would point to, but I think podcasts are certainly increasingly one of those ways that people who've got points of view, are keen to share them with the masses, or maybe very small groups and I would say put your browser and search for podcasts and the Australian economy. I think you'll find some interesting stuff at the moment.

Tandi:                       Fantastic. I will do that. Look for people who want to understand more about your work and your offering. Where should they go?

Jeremy Thorpe:    Possibly the easiest is through LinkedIn. We do use that as a micro blogging and it points to a lot of the work that we're doing. So Jeremy Thorpe on there, I'm on twitter@jeremythorpe, but the pwc.com.au website, if you search for economics, you'll see our economics team, but you'll search through there and you'll see many of the challenges and problems that we're trying to help our clients, whether they be public, private or not for profit solve.

Tandi:                      Fantastic. Thanks for coming on the Podcast.

Jeremy Thorpe:   Thanks very much.