Think tank

Based on Wikipedia: Think tank

In the ninth century, Charlemagne had a problem. He wanted to tax the Church, and the Church disagreed rather strongly about this arrangement. So the emperor did something that would echo through the centuries: he hired independent lawyers to build his case. Teams of scholars, paid by the crown but technically outside it, researched and argued for royal prerogatives against ecclesiastical power. This tug-of-war between monarchs and bishops over money and authority would continue for eight hundred years, and the model of paying independent experts to provide intellectual ammunition for your side never went away.

We just started calling them think tanks.

What Exactly Is a Think Tank?

The term itself is wonderfully absurd if you stop to consider it. Before the 1950s, "think tank" was American slang for the human brain, usually used as an insult. If someone said there was something wrong with your think tank, they meant you were dim. The phrase slowly migrated to describe places where thinking happened professionally, first applied to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences around 1958, then to military planning organizations, and eventually to the policy research institutes we recognize today.

A think tank, in contemporary usage, is an organization that performs research and advocacy on topics ranging from social policy to military strategy to economics to technology. Most are officially non-governmental, though some maintain cozy relationships with particular parties, businesses, or branches of the military. They publish studies, hold conferences, draft legislation, and generally attempt to shape how governments, businesses, and the public think about issues.

The key word there is "shape." Unlike universities, which at least nominally pursue knowledge for its own sake, think tanks exist to influence. Some do rigorous academic work. Others are essentially lobbying operations with a veneer of scholarly credibility. The spectrum between these poles is vast, and telling them apart requires attention.

The Prehistory of Professional Persuasion

Those medieval legal teams advising kings were proto-think tanks, but the more recognizable ancestors emerged in early modern France. Around 1620, the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy established the Académie des frères Dupuy in Paris, a gathering of scholars who discussed matters of public concern. A century later, the Club de l'Entresol operated between 1723 and 1731, focusing specifically on economics and foreign affairs. These were places where intellectuals could debate policy outside the formal structures of government or church.

The nineteenth century brought the first institutions we would recognize as modern think tanks. The Royal United Services Institute appeared in London in 1831, focused on military and security affairs. The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, took a different approach, gathering socialist intellectuals who believed in gradual reform rather than revolution. The Fabians would profoundly shape British politics, counting among their members George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and they helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the Labour Party and the welfare state.

Across the Atlantic, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace opened in Washington in 1910. Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate turned philanthropist, charged its trustees to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization." The Brookings Institution followed in 1916, explicitly modeled on academic institutions but focused on questions facing the federal government. These early American think tanks positioned themselves as non-partisan research centers, above the grubby business of ideology.

That positioning would not last.

Cold War Thinking Machines

During World War Two, think tanks were sometimes called "brain boxes," which captures something important about how they were perceived: as containers where intelligent people could be gathered to solve problems. The prototype for the modern policy think tank emerged from this wartime context.

The RAND Corporation started in 1946 as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft, became independent in 1948, and grew into something unprecedented. RAND pioneered systems analysis, game theory applications to military strategy, and the peculiar discipline of thinking systematically about nuclear war. Its analysts developed concepts like mutual assured destruction and studied how to win, or at least survive, a conflict that could end civilization. The organization attracted some of the best minds in mathematics, economics, and physics, putting them to work on questions that mixed technical rigor with apocalyptic stakes.

RAND's influence was enormous. Its alumni populated the national security establishment, and its methods spread to other institutions. The Cold War created an insatiable demand for strategic thinking, and think tanks proliferated to meet it. By the end of the conflict, most of the established policy institutes focused on international affairs, security studies, and foreign policy. The questions of the age required sustained intellectual attention, and these organizations provided it.

The Ideological Turn

Something changed in the 1970s and 1980s. The older think tanks had presented themselves as neutral arbiters, conducting research that would inform policy regardless of political orientation. A new generation rejected this premise.

Conservative activists and donors decided they needed their own intellectual infrastructure. The American Enterprise Institute, founded in 1938 but reinvigorated in the 1970s, became explicitly oriented toward free-market economics. The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, went further, producing quick-turnaround policy papers designed to influence legislation directly. These organizations did not pretend to neutrality. They had a perspective, and they prosecuted it energetically.

The left developed parallel institutions, though often with different funding structures and organizational cultures. Progressive think tanks like the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003, aimed to provide the same kind of policy ammunition that conservative organizations had been deploying for decades.

This ideological sorting has shaped the contemporary think tank landscape. When you encounter a study from a policy institute, one of your first questions should be: who funds this organization, and what perspective does it represent? A report on energy policy from a think tank funded by oil companies will likely reach different conclusions than one from an environmentalist organization. Neither is necessarily wrong, but neither is neutral either.

How Think Tanks Actually Work

The median think tank publishes about 138 articles per year. That is not very many. But the Brookings Institution alone published 3,880 reports in 2020. The variation is immense.

Think tanks influence policy through multiple channels, some public and some considerably less so. On the public side, they hold conferences, publish books and journals, maintain active social media presences, and encourage their scholars to give lectures and media interviews. They testify before legislative committees, translating research into language that lawmakers can use.

The private channels matter more. Think tank fellows move into government positions, sometimes cycling back and forth between research and implementation. Organizations invite policymakers to events, building relationships that give scholars access when decisions are being made. Former government officials join think tanks, bringing expertise and connections. The revolving door between think tanks and government creates a community of people who know each other, share assumptions, and influence each other's thinking.

German political scientist Dieter Plehwe has analyzed think tanks as "knowledge actors" embedded in networks of relationships with academics, media, political groups, and corporate funders. These networks can form what he calls "discourse coalitions," groups that may not formally coordinate but work toward common aims. He cites the deregulation of trucking, airlines, and telecommunications in the 1970s as an example: the Ford Motor Company, FedEx, neo-liberal economists, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute all pushed in the same direction, even though they were not operating from a shared blueprint.

The Manufacturing of Doubt

Not all think tank activity aims at good-faith policy improvement. Some exists to create confusion.

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition formed in the mid-1990s with a specific purpose: to dispute research linking secondhand smoke to cancer. An internal Philip Morris memorandum revealed the strategy explicitly. The tobacco company wanted to undermine the credibility of the Environmental Protection Agency, but recognized that attacking the agency over tobacco alone would not work. The attack had to be part of "a larger mosaic that concentrates all the EPA's enemies against it at one time."

This is manufactured doubt as a product. Create an organization with a scientific-sounding name. Fund research that questions inconvenient findings. Ensure that media coverage presents "both sides" even when one side represents overwhelming scientific consensus and the other represents industry interests. The technique has been deployed on tobacco, climate change, and countless other issues where corporate profits conflict with public health or environmental protection.

Military contractors have employed similar strategies, funding think tanks that advocate for weapons systems and interventionist foreign policies. The flow of money creates obvious incentive problems. A think tank that depends on defense industry funding will think very carefully before publishing research that questions defense spending.

The Foreign Funding Question

A 2014 New York Times investigation revealed that more than a dozen prominent Washington think tanks had received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments. The money came with expectations. According to the report, these organizations pushed United States officials to adopt policies that often reflected donor priorities.

This creates an awkward situation. Think tanks present themselves as independent voices in American policy debates, but some are partially funded by governments that have direct stakes in those debates. The scholars may be entirely sincere in their views. The research may be methodologically sound. But the funding creates at minimum an appearance problem, and possibly something worse.

The United States is not unique here. Think tanks worldwide navigate relationships with governments, corporations, and wealthy individuals who all have interests to advance. Transparency about funding sources helps, but not all organizations are forthcoming about where their money comes from.

Global Proliferation

For most of the twentieth century, think tanks were primarily an American phenomenon, with smaller numbers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe. Japan had policy institutes, but they typically lacked independence, operating as extensions of government ministries or corporations rather than as truly autonomous organizations.

This changed dramatically after 1980. Two-thirds of all think tanks that exist today were established after 1970, and more than half since 1980. The end of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalization created new demands for policy expertise worldwide. In Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, international organizations and foreign governments actively supported the creation of independent policy research institutions.

The results have been mixed. Some new think tanks produce excellent work and have become genuine forces for better governance. Others remain dependent on foreign funding in ways that limit their ability to challenge powerful local interests. The model of the independent policy institute does not transplant automatically into different political cultures and economic conditions.

As of 2014, there were more than 11,000 think tanks worldwide. India has the second-largest number after the United States, with most based in New Delhi. China has developed its own ecosystem, including both government-affiliated organizations like the Development Research Center of the State Council and more independent entities. Hong Kong has think tanks focused on the particular challenges of operating under "One Country, Two Systems." Ghana's Institute of Economic Affairs has organized presidential debates every election year since 1996.

Each national context shapes what think tanks do and how they do it. The American model of the revolving door between think tanks and government does not apply everywhere. The European tradition of party-affiliated foundations differs from the American preference for nominally non-partisan organizations. Asian think tanks often maintain closer relationships with government ministries than their Western counterparts.

Evaluating Think Tank Claims

When a think tank publishes a report, how should you assess it? Several questions help:

• Who funds this organization? Funding does not automatically discredit research, but it provides important context.
• What is the organization's stated perspective? Some think tanks are explicitly ideological, which is honest. Others claim neutrality while reliably reaching conclusions that favor particular interests.
• Who conducted the research? Academic credentials matter. So does whether the researcher has a track record of rigorous work.
• Has the research been reviewed by independent experts? The National Education Policy Center runs a "Think Twice" project that subjects education policy publications to expert review. Similar scrutiny should apply more broadly.
• Does the conclusion follow from the evidence, or does it leap beyond what the data supports? Advocacy organizations sometimes produce solid research but then draw policy conclusions that are not actually justified by their findings.

Media coverage often fails to provide this context. Both left-wing and right-wing think tank representatives are frequently quoted as neutral experts without any indication of their ideological orientation or funding sources. This is not a conspiracy; it is a consequence of deadline pressure and the journalistic convention of seeking expert comment. But it means consumers of news need to do their own due diligence.

The Discourse Shapers

Think tanks matter because ideas matter. The policies governments adopt reflect, at least in part, the intellectual frameworks available to policymakers. Those frameworks do not emerge spontaneously. They are developed, articulated, and promoted by organizations whose job it is to think about policy.

This gives think tanks genuine power, though power of a peculiar kind. They cannot compel anyone to do anything. They can only persuade. But persuasion shapes what seems possible, what seems reasonable, what seems inevitable. The range of acceptable policy options in any debate has been influenced by decades of think tank work defining that range.

The conservative movement understood this early. In the 1970s, corporate leaders and ideological activists invested heavily in building intellectual infrastructure. They funded think tanks, endowed university chairs, supported magazines and journals. Over time, this investment paid off. Ideas that had seemed marginal became mainstream. Policies that had seemed impossible became inevitable.

Whether you view this as a success story or a cautionary tale depends on your politics. But the strategic insight applies broadly: if you want to change policy, you must first change thinking. And changing thinking requires institutions devoted to that purpose.

The Future of Professional Thinking

Think tanks face new challenges. Trust in institutions has declined broadly, and policy research organizations have not been spared. The proliferation of think tanks has created a kind of expert inflation, where anyone can find a credentialed scholar to support almost any position. Social media has fragmented attention and accelerated the news cycle beyond what traditional research processes can match.

Yet the fundamental need that think tanks address has not disappeared. Complex policy problems require sustained intellectual attention. Governments need analysis they cannot produce internally. Publics need help understanding issues that do not fit into headlines. Someone has to do the careful thinking.

The question is whether that thinking will be rigorous and honest, or whether the institutions of policy research will continue their drift toward advocacy dressed in scholarly clothes. The answer probably depends on funding. Think tanks will produce what their funders want. If donors reward quality research regardless of conclusions, quality research will flourish. If donors reward predetermined conclusions, that is what they will get.

From Charlemagne's lawyers to RAND's nuclear strategists to today's global network of policy institutes, the basic transaction remains the same: someone with resources pays someone with expertise to think about problems and propose solutions. The quality of governance depends, more than most people realize, on the quality of that thinking.