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The IDEA BROKERS
Gulliver thought the professors were out of their senses when he visited the Grand Academy of Lagado on the Isle of Balnibarbi. He was bemused by their many improbable schemes--extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, constructing houses from the rood down, and training pigs to plow with their snouts. Yet however bold and inventive the various projects and their 'projectors' (as he termed the scientists were, there remained something troubling about his visit to the academy, something fundamentally deficient about the experts and their ideas.
- GenresHistory
313 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2014
This book tries to walk an uneasy line between academic analysis and public journalism. Though it largely succeeds in its goal of explaining how think tanks grew in importance, one is left wondering what the real implications of think tanks for American politics have been, and how they have impacted actual policy. Most often the book becomes just a series of short histories, straightforward if not intriguing, of every major think tank that has arisen in the last 100 years.
The author opens up with a long history of the role of the intellectual counselor in politics, from Machiavelli onwards, yet he locates the origins of independent policy institutes in America to the American Social Science Association (1865) and its numerous discipline-based offspring (such as the American Economic Association (1885)). These were still largely amateur gatherings of policy enthusiasts, but their pronouncements and papers allowed many professors to glimpse the possibility of real-world impact. In the early 20th century, philanthropists funded a host of temporary research organizations tied to these professors that finally had real cash behind them, and then the Russell Sage Foundation took the big leap in 1907 when it actually began doing its own social research: on poor conditions in Pittsburgh, which birthed a host of other urban-focused papers and monographs. In 1916 the Rockefeller foundation started what would become the Brookings Institute to study the minutiae of governmental administration, and in World War I the institute was hired to help with a bunch of different plans, like price setting. The war thus caused the earliest think tanks to be welcomed into government for the first time.
The next big war gave rise to mathematical "operations analysis," and many professors in previously apolitical disciplines like physics and math experienced the thrill of policy work, and strove to continue in the field after the armistice. They therefore helped create RAND, for Research and Development, which used dense mathematics to analyze the affects and value of budgets and programs, especially for national defense (RAND also helped General "Hap" Arnold ensure the air force could justify its existence after the war). These young intellectuals finally grew into the "Whiz Kids" and "Action Intellectuals" that eventually populated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and their acolytes formed the basis of domestic groups like the Urban Institute.
At the same, time, however, frustrated conservatives like W. Glenn Campbell of the Hoover Institute and William Baroody Sr. of the American Enterprise Institute, revivified what were once stodgy old discussion groups and turned them into the base of a conservative counter-reaction. For years "think tanks" (originally a World War II term that acquired public prominence in the Kennedy years) had been almost unanimously populated with liberal interventionists, and their consensus about good government liberalism seemed to give them an apolitical sheen. The rise of the conservative counter-establishment brought this supposedly apolitical stance into question, and threatened the supposed political neutrality on which think tanks had justified themselves.
Modern think tanks are more likely to be stridently partisan, and hence less likely to command universal allegiance than their older counterparts. As think tanks proliferated (the author identifies up to 1000 in 1980s DC) their influence ironically seemed to diminish, as they became just another organ for pushing political ideology.
There are a seeming infinitude of more case studies here, many of which add little to the overall thrust of the narrative, but on the whole I am glad I read the book and know a little bit more about these institutions that still, for all their inherent faults and problems, define the way we think about politics today.
The author opens up with a long history of the role of the intellectual counselor in politics, from Machiavelli onwards, yet he locates the origins of independent policy institutes in America to the American Social Science Association (1865) and its numerous discipline-based offspring (such as the American Economic Association (1885)). These were still largely amateur gatherings of policy enthusiasts, but their pronouncements and papers allowed many professors to glimpse the possibility of real-world impact. In the early 20th century, philanthropists funded a host of temporary research organizations tied to these professors that finally had real cash behind them, and then the Russell Sage Foundation took the big leap in 1907 when it actually began doing its own social research: on poor conditions in Pittsburgh, which birthed a host of other urban-focused papers and monographs. In 1916 the Rockefeller foundation started what would become the Brookings Institute to study the minutiae of governmental administration, and in World War I the institute was hired to help with a bunch of different plans, like price setting. The war thus caused the earliest think tanks to be welcomed into government for the first time.
The next big war gave rise to mathematical "operations analysis," and many professors in previously apolitical disciplines like physics and math experienced the thrill of policy work, and strove to continue in the field after the armistice. They therefore helped create RAND, for Research and Development, which used dense mathematics to analyze the affects and value of budgets and programs, especially for national defense (RAND also helped General "Hap" Arnold ensure the air force could justify its existence after the war). These young intellectuals finally grew into the "Whiz Kids" and "Action Intellectuals" that eventually populated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and their acolytes formed the basis of domestic groups like the Urban Institute.
At the same, time, however, frustrated conservatives like W. Glenn Campbell of the Hoover Institute and William Baroody Sr. of the American Enterprise Institute, revivified what were once stodgy old discussion groups and turned them into the base of a conservative counter-reaction. For years "think tanks" (originally a World War II term that acquired public prominence in the Kennedy years) had been almost unanimously populated with liberal interventionists, and their consensus about good government liberalism seemed to give them an apolitical sheen. The rise of the conservative counter-establishment brought this supposedly apolitical stance into question, and threatened the supposed political neutrality on which think tanks had justified themselves.
Modern think tanks are more likely to be stridently partisan, and hence less likely to command universal allegiance than their older counterparts. As think tanks proliferated (the author identifies up to 1000 in 1980s DC) their influence ironically seemed to diminish, as they became just another organ for pushing political ideology.
There are a seeming infinitude of more case studies here, many of which add little to the overall thrust of the narrative, but on the whole I am glad I read the book and know a little bit more about these institutions that still, for all their inherent faults and problems, define the way we think about politics today.
April 23, 2017
Interesting historical account of how conservative plus neoliberal ideas have widespread in American society mainly through the increasing prominence of right wing think tanks since early 70's.
October 7, 2010
comprehensive review of rise of think tanks in america... but pretty dry
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews