Think Tanks: How Fake Experts Shape the News

So to put it briefly, most think tanks are basically rich people telling the rest of society :"No we cannot let go of our wealth and power, because it would totally hurt you! Out of the kindness of my heart I cannot let you be hurt by all my money!"

"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce." I'm guessing this isn't the Adam Smith Institute's favorite Adam Smith quote.

I'm always skeptical of a vague tweet that just says "economists" "scientists" or "experts". When you click on the interview it's usually someone still in study who just joined a fancy institute. That or the "economist" is just some businessman who never studied economic theory and just reads a lot of books about stock.

I decided to read some Adam Smith Institute articles, as to fact check Tom. I was honestly surprised by how accurate his description of them are. The most stunning thing was perhaps how ideological these "fact based" institutes are. In one article they claimed that capitalism was natural, spontaneous and the only way to do economics, citing no sources (not to mention the fact that there have been several non-capitalist systems that have been/ are in effect).

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s, many of these neo liberal Think Tanks advised former Soviet countries on how to restructure their economies. As you can imagine, it basically meant to privatize everything whether it makes sense or not and allow foreign investors to buy up state assets for pennies. During that time my country Latvia was ranked one of the most business friendly countries by the World Bank. And what does it mean to be “business friendly”? It had one of the highest work place accident rates in Europe, one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe and one of the lowest healthcare standards. A 1% tax on property and almost 59% flat tax on labor, split between the employer and the employee. The housing market was so inflated, in order to save the banks from a decline in property prices every new mortgage borrower had to bring their whole family to the bank to sign the mortgage, so the whole family would be held liable. In a study conducted by the European Union at that time, 1/3 of working age Latvians intended to emigrate to other European countries in the next 5 years.

I teach high school economics. There is a profusion of free, professional-looking teaching material (lesson plans, activities, etc.) available online from FEE and other libertarian think tanks, and I'd guess a lot of economics teachers don't even realize these are lobbying organizations.

this channel is always like "after this 2h long dissection of Ancient Roman politics, we can finally start to see how they have affected CoD voice chats". And I love it because of this.

Thank you! This was brilliant! In my country (Bulgaria), "economists" is now synonymous with think tank employees with dubious credentials funded by unknown benefactors. The exact same model replicated half a decade later.

I’ve been looking forward to this since you mentioned it, fascinating insight. Like most people, I hear these headlines and ‘studies’ in fields I’m unfamiliar with and assume there’s some legitimacy, unless I actually take the time to look further, wade through the deliberately obfuscating language and academic-sounding titles (as you mentioned). Funnily enough I know a whole slew of people currently or formerly in think tanks (all from LSE) and they’re a mixed bag, so it’s annoying that ‘think tank’ is often understood to imply ‘lobby group’…due to the people you talked about. Great vid.

I'm from Brazil and this video is extremely enlightening. Thanks for the amazing work. Unfortunately my country has also become a victim of blatant political disinformation and our life has gotten a lot worse in recent years.

I remember a time in my life when I thought "Think Tanks" were metaphorical tanks that shoot "thoughts". Then again, I wasn't completely wrong

finally, been waiting on someone to address this very serious issue. people really underestimate the influence these "experts" have on public policy and journalism, especially here in the third world.

This is a fantastic summary as someone in academia. Especially dangerous are the "climate skeptic" think tanks, of which many promoted "scientists" that questioned the link between cigarettes and lung cancer and promoted leaded gas in their past. The Heartland Institute comes to mind

Having studied at an American university, the amount of study and class materials, courses, programs, campus clubs, books and other stuff provided by all these institutes and groups was really off-putting to me. Almost every field of study was subject to these thinktanks and their protégés.

Hey, former think tank intern here. I just wanted to comment quickly on the history and focus of this video which may be beneficial to note. Forgive me for the wide date range, I am writing mostly from memory. Most, if not all the information I have can be found in Donald Abelson’s “Do Think Tanks Matter.” The book itself compares Canadian and US think tanks though the author beautifully describes the history of think tanks as a whole. Highly recommend the read. The first point I would like to make is about Brookings in a historical context. Brookings, though influential, was not as important and influential to the right as you would describe. The biggest influence that Brookings had was on AEI, which presents itself as a counterpart to Brookings (even today). It is true, AEI was founded with libertarian principles in mind, mainly because the founders were concerned about FDR’s spending policy. The reason I bring up AEI is because this is the organization that brings what you’re characterizing as advocacy tanks all together. Around the 1960s/70s, AEI started to focus on marketing their research heavily, focusing on publishing books, reports, etc. This model directly inspired Heritage. The organization itself has said that if focuses a lot more on great marketing rather than high quality research. Thus, what Abelson describes as the “advocacy think tank” was born. Now on to other historical points I thought I could mention as well. The Brookings Institute for Government Research was created in 1916, merging with the Brookings graduate school of economics in 1927 (for the longest time, you could actually receive a degree from Brookings). The first other big think tanks that arose were the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1910), The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace (1920), and the Council on Foreign Relations (1921). Though I understand that Brookings is important to your central argument, it is important to mention this think tanks as well, especially Hoover, which has gained a reputation as a conservatives think tank. The categorization of think tanks is important here as well. Not all think tanks are the same. They do not all try to achieve the same goals. Brookings (maybe AEI, though Abelson describes AEI more as an advocacy tank—- though his timeline of think tank history challenges that idea as AEI was created in the 1930s, while the first advocacy tanks popped up in the 1970s) is described as “university without students.” These tanks focus on good, high quality research first and foremost. Organizations like the Rand can be described as government contractors. These popped up around the 1950s. And finally advocacy tanks, like Heritage, were first popping up in the 1970s and are still popping up to this day, though in new ways. Though all of these are “think tanks,” I would never describe them as the same. They serve wildly different purposes and it is important to be critical of these advocacy tanks. Which is why I appreciate what this video is trying to do: educate those who may be using advocacy think tank research without verifying it’s validity because it came from a well known institution. It’s important to note as well, these advocacy think tanks are not only a right-wing phenomenon. Most notably, the Center for American Progress has been getting a lot of traction as well. Though, I will say, advocacy tanks do seem to be more cited by the right, though I am not sure if there is any possible way to verify this. An interesting concept to expand upon may be the idea of “dark money” organization and advocacy in general. Not necessarily think tanks, but how political organizations mobilize voting bases. These are just some comments I wanted to make. This video is well made. I appreciate that you put your sources in the description, that is always awesome to see.

"welfare programs for the poor had made it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term" The guys who get bonuses based on quarterly earnings reports want people to think that short sightedness, and poor planning is exclusively a poor people issue.

Economists: The Adam Smith Institute is the stupidest think tank we've heard of Adam Smith Institute: But you have heard of us

I used to have a cartoon from the newspaper editorial pages called "The Think Tanks", It depicted various army tanks destroying various public institutions. For instance the Cato tank going after Education. The Heritage tank running down the environment. And the American Enterprise tank firing away at Social Security.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate your characterisation of the UK media spectrum as “Centrist Transphobes to Racist Tories”.

this is why debating theory, philosophy or ideology on the right is borderline impossible... because they pull out a "study" that I then have to debunk piece by piece and then when that doesn't work (because they are just stubborn) I then have to go into the fact that their source is publishing through a known propagandistic "think-tank" and then pull up other articles to prove it is what I say it is... this is a common tactic for those who do not want to argue the actual merits of the idea and instead bog down in details... they pull out one "fact" I have to spend 5 minutes debunking and then they have successfully side-stepped my original question. More places need to hire researchers and do proper vetting vs just leaving it to the journalists themselves to try and handle it all on their own.