Think Tanks: What's the point? The Alarming Corruption of the Think Tanks. Item: U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) resigns from Congress to become president of the Heritage Foundation Item: Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey resigns as chairman of FreedomWorks over $12 million in secret cash payments to the organization, leaves with $8 million payout. These two items illustrate an important phenomenon now taking place in Washington: the end of the think tank as we know it.
Rather than being institutions for scholarship and research, often employing people with advanced degrees in specialized fields, think tanks are becoming more like lobbying and public relations companies. Increasingly, their output involves advertising and grassroots political operations rather than books and studies. They are also becoming more closely allied with political parties and members of Congress, to whom they have become virtual adjuncts.
Historically, think tanks like the Brookings Institution were universities without teaching. I think this is a very dangerous trend. US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy | World news. A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America's nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians. Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero - except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general.
In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. The network centres on research institutes - thinktanks that attempt to influence government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified donors. The Billionaire Koch Brothers’ War Against Obama. On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.
The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. U.S. Intellectual History: Historicizing the Conservative Think Tank by Jason Stahl.
American Enterprise Institute. ALEC. Cato Institute. WINEP. The Hudson Institute. Council on Foreign Relations. Thinktanks | Politics. Adam Curtis Blog: THE CURSE OF TINA. Think Tanks / related - curators... Richard Littlemore | Heartland Insider Exposes Institute's Budget and Strategy. Think Tanks in the Economics Profession. Indicators via representation at the Allied Social Sciences Association meetings. In the past few years, I have read more policy analyses from Washington DC based think tanks than usual. I’ve assessed some of these reports on Econbrowser over the past year, including some by the Heritage Foundation [H1] [H2] [H3], American Enterprise Institute [A1], Peterson Institute for International Economics [P1], [P2], Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies [Ph1] [Ph2]. I thought it would be interesting to see how many economists from these think tanks attended the Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in Chicago, as an indicator of the level of rigor and location near the mainstream of these research groups.
Here’s my rough tabulation of how many individuals from each research group, as listed in the preliminary program. Figure 1: Number of participants at ASSA 2012. Over course, one year is not necessarily representative.