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May 13, 2008
Do think tanks buy scholars who agree with them, or pay scholars to agree with them? In Australia its more the former than the latter. Hence the question mark over their publications. Is ihis judgement justified?Megan McArdle at The Atlantic has some ideas on on think tanks. MCardle says:
I like think tanks. .... I think they do a lot of good work. But the political policy ones do their best work when they are trying to decide policy within a movement; that's when you start seeing real innovative work. They are also very good at providing critiques of academic work in their areas of interest.
When they turn to fighting outsiders over, say, the minimum wage, the quality of their work sharply degrades. They have limited ability to change their policy position, because the donors will revolt; if they can't get an answer the donors will like, they don't ask the questions. They also only hire scholars who agree with them. That already biases their work, but then you have to contend with the groupthink problem: when everyone at the office agrees with you that your opponents are idiots, and you socialize mostly with other people in the movement, your thinking gets a tad lazy
I presume this is different from a professional blogger working at The Atlantic or say New Matilda in Australia. The Atlantic is interesting as it offers free content online from this year.
I presume that professional means being paid to blog. The blogging world is still largely an amateur medium in Australia -----a few bloggers work for Big Media. A professional blogger is a paid pundit with a column that just happens to be on the Internet instead of on paper. So how is that different from working for a think tank?
Isn't it the case that those bloggers who are paid to blog by an institution generally do what that institution wants, and the institution hires them knowing they won't make waves?
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Gary, I think one of the comments on one of Megan's sites said it all.
Namely that the Heritage Foundation was always a whorehouse, and that ALL the right-wing tanks now are---the whores of BABBLE-on.
And that Cato is crippled by group-think. Which is true and also paradoxical, because the Catos pretend that they are "free"-thinking individuals.
The Catos are all firmly embedded in or enfolded within the dominant one-dimensional MATRIX.
Here in OZ, were not the CIS and the IPA effectively the ideas and policy making machines of Howard & COMPANY--the purpose of life being the unlimited expansion of BUSY-ness.