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« Back to Thinking about Think Tanks, Part One of Two main page    Transcript for: Thinking about Think Tanks, Part One of TwoTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1328 Thinking about Think Tanks, Part One of Two FEED DATE: October 13, 2005 Christopher DeMuth Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello, IÕm Ben Wattenberg. Today on Think Tank we are going to talk about Think Tanks. In Washington and elsewhere there are a plethora of such institutions Šsometimes shrouded in mystery. Ideologically, they range from left, to right, to center; they play an important role in defining issues and ideas for both governments and for the public. How do these Think Tanks work; why are they important? To find out, Think Tank is joined by Christopher DeMuth. He is an attorney, a scholar, a former high-ranking government official, a fund raiser, a writer, and the President of the American Enterprise Institute, a Think Tank. The topic before the house: thinking about think tanks, part one, this week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Chris DeMuth, welcome to Think Tank. Normally, Chris, the first question we ask of a guest is for a biography, and we will do that in just a moment, but this is an unusual program. Chris DeMuth, for our viewerÕs benefit, is my boss at AEI, which is a think tank, and I think our viewers should understand what the ground rules are. I decided to do this program because think tanks have become, in the last few decades I guess, a terribly important part of public policy formulation in America and most people donÕt really understand how they operate. Now, I think Chris knows more about the topic than anyone, but I do not intend to bend over backwards and throw nothing but softballs, nor will I bend over frontwards and be extra harsh... DEMUTH: Be tough. WATTENBERG: ...on criticisms, but I will ask some questions that, about criticisms that have been made about think tanks, conservative, neo- conservative, liberal, including AEI. Okay, let us begin. First question, give us a little bit about your background. DEMUTH: I went to law school and I practiced law and I taught graduate school in Economics and Law at the Kennedy School at Harvard. I had two tours in government. I worked in the Nixon administration as an assistant to Pat Moynihan on the White House staff just out of college and many years later I went back and worked for Ronald Reagan in his first administration where I was in charge of regulatory policy, or as we put it then, deregulatory policy. I had been out of government for a few years, and I was publishing a magazine on government regulatory policy, and I was a private consultant when I had the opportunity to come to AEI. I didnÕt know if I would be here or two or three years, as I had been in everything else IÕd done, but itÕs now been 19 years. So, thatÕs the last almost 40 years for me. WATTENBERG: Okay. LetÕs start with some simple stuff. What is a think tank? DEMUTH: A think tank... WATTENBERG: A lot of people donÕt understand. They donÕt get it. DEMUTH: Okay. A think tank is like a university, but without students, where the scholars engage in fulltime research. At a think tank, we think. We read, we write, we argue, we debate, and we produce all manner of publications on government policy issues at AEI and most think thanks. WeÕre different from a university in one other respect. WeÕre not just doing the research for its own sake. We are reformers, earnest reformers. We want to improve the world. We want to have influence, as much as we can, in the political process, where there are many other considerations, and we try to write things that are interesting, accessible, and we promote our work. We try to get on Ben WattenbergÕs show. We try to get in the newspaper op-ed pages, and we hawk our books and magazines much more aggressively than a university would feel comfortable with. WATTENBERG: How do these think thanks come to be? Are they mostly American invention, and are they growing rapidly? DEMUTH: First, they are almost exclusively American. There are dozens of think tanks in Washington. There are think tanks in most of the states now. If you go abroad, you find a few in London, you find a few in Canada and Australia. Elsewhere, itÕs a very scarce phenomenon, and we spend a lot of time, especially in Eastern Europe and in some of the countries in Asia, trying to help people that want to start think tanks. WATTENBERG: You were just in Poland on that topic, right? DEMUTH: I was just in Poland. We held a conference in Gdansk on the 25th anniversary of the legalization of Solidarity. I almost met with some intellectuals in Krakow and in Gdansk that are forming a policy research institutes. I didnÕt get to your big question. WATTENBERG: Which was, are they growing? DEMUTH: Are they growing and why? If you went back to the early Ō50s you would find Rand in California and you would find AEI and Brookings in Washington and that was about it. Now, there are several other large ones, primarily the Hoover Institution at Stanford in California, and there are dozens of think tanks in Washington, many of them specializing in particular subjects, a few of them full line think tanks like ours. WATTENBERG: Environmental think tanks, civil rights think tanks, feminist think tanks. DEMUTH: Right. International economics, trade. WATTENBERG: You name it. DEMUTH: Environment. ThatÕs right. WATTENBERG: How many scholars do you have at AEI? DEMUTH: We have 50 scholars right here in our headquarters in downtown Washington. About 150 people work here, and about 50 of them are independent, senior scholars, such as yourself, and we have about a hundred adjunct scholars at universities around the country that do research for us. We publish their work. They come to our conferences. WATTENBERG: Again, so the public gets an understanding, what is the annual AEI budget? DEMUTH: Approximately $20 Million. WATTENBERG: Now, have the number of think tanks right of center grown rapidly? Because, in the universities, the faculties have really, at least most of us think, have moved to the left. Was that an action/reaction kind of thing? DEMUTH: I think that thatÕs part of it. IÕd say thatÕs maybe half of it. One-half of it is that the intellectual action in the past 30 years has been on the right. The new ideas in tax policies, world reform, foreign policy, theyÕve all come from the center to the right of the spectrum. In previous eras, the new ideas were coming from the left, and I think that think tanks have grown as a sort of expression of the ferment that existed as a minority viewpoint and then gradually gathered more adherence, so that it is now - weÕre almost an establishment of our own. But, at the same time, the universities remain - not only remained very much to the left, but became far more so, and they became infected by several odd intellectual strains: feminism, womenÕs studies, and so forth. They became very hospitable - very inhospitable to people of a certain viewpoint, so that we now, at AEI, have many, many people - political scientists, economists - that could have prominent tenured positions in universities, but find AEI a more open and yeasty environment in which to do their work. WATTENBERG: A big question in America about accountability. You do not make these decisions unilaterally? You have Š thereÕs a Board of Trustees, a council of academic advisors? DEMUTH: ThatÕs right. WATTENBERG: You are in regular consultation with them? DEMUTH: We have a Board of Trustees that consists of 24 prominent executives of business and financial corporations. We have a council of academic advisors of 12 university based academics, senior accomplished people in political science, history, economics and law. I meet with the Board of Trustees many times throughout the year. I have one or two meetings with the council of academic advisors, and I talk with them all the time. They read our work. They tell me what they like, and they tell me what they donÕt like. WATTENBERG: It seems to me there are two kinds of think tanks. There are think tanks that have an institutional policy Š if you call Š the two IÕll mention are conservative ones, but - the Heritage Institution or Cato -and say, what do you think about the XYZ issue, they will say, well, hereÕs our paper on it, and the same is true with many of the liberal think tanks. There are others that say here are six guys who have written about it and take your choice. Where does AEI fall? DEMUTH: We donÕt just say weÕre after truth. We have some sense of where we think the truth lies when good policy is concerned. At AEI, we believe in the free, private social order, private markets, private institutions. We tend to be skeptics, show-me Missourians, when it comes to government programs. We want to see what the facts are. WeÕre for a limited government. WeÕre for individual liberty and responsibility. Now, those terms that IÕve used can solve some problems, but with respect to most problems, they donÕt give you answers to what good policy is. The work that we do is done by people that share these views, but the work is not institutional. AEI doesnÕt take positions on any subject, and intellectual work is adherently individualistic. So, weÕre not organized like General Motors. We donÕt have somebody at the - doing an assembly line, producing an institutional product. We try to hire people of extraordinary ability, working on the most important political issues and leave the conclusions and proposals to them. WATTENBERG: There have been some criticisms, and IÕm sure youÕve heard of them, about how think tanks raise their money. Do corporations and foundations and individuals fund the institute as a whole or single project or a single scholar? How does that work? DEMUTH: All of the above. We raise about $20 Million, $25 million a year, some of it for endowment, most of it for the annual budget each year. And, very roughly, itÕs divided a third business corporations, a third individuals, and a third foundations. So, we have over 300 corporate donors to AEI, and some of the donations, especially from foundations, will be for a particular project, on government regulation or improving economic development assistance. The corporate donations and individual donations tend to be just for the whole AEI. WATTENBERG: But, if a corporation - if Merck says, look, weÕre getting killed on this Vioxx thing, we want you to fund a study on that, and weÕll put up the money, would you do that? DEMUTH: Usually, if somebody comes to us and says, will you do this study if we give you a grant, usually, weÕll say no, unless itÕs something weÕre already doing. You would come to me, and I would say, Ben, weÕre not working on that, but hereÕs another thing that I think is even more important. Let me see if I can interest you in it. WATTENBERG: At universities, senior scholars, although many of them are changing now, have tenure. At think tanks they do not, and the argument is made that that could affect a scholarÕs ability or desire to do independent research that might not fit in. DEMUTH: Let me tell you a secret. In the academic world, it is well known that tenure has nothing to do with academic freedom. It is about middle age burnout insurance. Young people want to know that they have a job all their life, even if they become less productive later on. It may be that we attract people who are a little less risk averse, or theyÕre not so concerned about being coddled in a bunch of perpetual welfare benefits. TheyÕre more confident of their ability to produce good work. WATTENBERG: Do you think that some good ideas have come from the more liberal think tanks - environmentalism, civil rights, feminism - and IÕve talked to you about this: environmentalism, and I know you were in the regulatory scheme of things, that in principle, we want to live in a world Š I donÕt want to answer the question for you Š but of some environmental regulation, but theyÕve gone too far. Is that basically the position of yours? DEMUTH: Our environmental policy or good ideas from liberal think tanks? WATTENBERG: Take your pick. DEMUTH: Well, IÕll take the second one first. Since 1970 when EPA was created and we had the first major Clean Air Act, I think that environmental policy has been one of AmericaÕs sensational success stories in government policy. At the same time - in terms of producing results - at the same time, it has been sensationally wasteful. Both can happen at the same time, that is, weÕve produced spectacular improvement in the quality of air, water, in the way we deal with toxic chemicals and problems of land disposal. WeÕve put aside large parts of real estate for national parks, for city parks. This is what a rich society like ours wants to do, and we have gotten enormous environmental improvements over the - over those 35 years. At the same time, the policies that we adopted back in the 1970s, and this was something I worked on back then, were very explicit controls on individual production processes, engineering controls. It was almost a Stalinist approach. It was the first thing that was done. It produced a lot of results, but it also produced an enormous amount of waste. We spent billions and billions and billions of dollars for very little or no environmental improvement, so we could have done much better. It was a new area of policy. We learned a lot during those first 10 years and by the end of the 1970s when I was teaching these things at Harvard, I think almost everybody Š forget their politics Š even at Harvard, who studied these issues seriously understood that we needed to make fundamental improvements. Instead, weÕve only made modest improvements and we still have environmental policies that while they are effective, are tremendously wasteful. We could be getting much more environmental improvement for less money. WATTENBERG: I mean... DEMUTH: But the political debate has become stymied. Most people donÕt understand the tedious details of how these programs work. They want a tough cop on the beat. They know that youÕre regulating big corporations, and they have a lot of power, so they, you know, will tend to instinctively to favor the tough cop on environmental matters, and theyÕve seen improvements. WATTENBERG: Just as a rule of thumb, given the short handedness of people in government and people in the congress or state government, the think tanks have more scholarly resources to do serious research than do these operational aspects of government. Is that basically correct? DEMUTH: Yes, thatÕs right and actually in my years here, IÕve been more impressed by this. Our government has become so overextended. It is doing so many things, and the politics has become so professionalized. You know, the Congressmen, they donÕt spend their evenings reading books; they spend their evenings going to fundraisers. When they question a witness at a hearing, they get their questions from an interest group to make some point. ItÕs become quite almost mechanized, and a lot of the deliberation, which is supposed to be part of the representative process, has been wrung out of the formal institutions of government, and I think the think tanks have - I think the think tanks have almost been a sort of a private sector correction to this problem that we have in Washington. What they donÕt see is the enormous waste that has gone into this or to the potential for doing much better in the future. So, itÕs a tough area. WATTENBERG: Question. When the George W. Bush administration came into office in the year 2000, the word was on the street that you were offered some very important jobs, yet you decided to stay at AEI. And my two questions: How come, and do you think it was the right decision? DEMUTH: IÕm a great admirer of President Bush, and I would have been honored to serve in his administration, I might be honored to serve in his administration sometime in the future, but I have - IÕve been very happy to be at AEI. I enjoy my colleagues. I think weÕre doing important work and I expect to stay here indefinitely. WATTENBERG: You can make the case that the think tanks have more to do with creating policy than the governments in their own way. What are you most proud of in your think tank career? Can you single something out, or is sort of just a general kind of thing? DEMUTH: Well, it is a general kind of thing but IÕll try to say it in a way that it doesnÕt sound like mush. Maintaining a big institution that supports hundreds of people and produces thousands of publications and conferences is very hard work. ItÕs much harder work than I thought when I came here. The great universities have endowments in the billions and we have been, until recently, pretty much a hand-to-mouth organization. And it has been very hard work creating an institution where people such as yourself and your colleagues can do world class research on difficult policy and political problems and come up with solutions that actually have some appeal to people in the world of practical politics. So, I think that simply the blocking and tackling, the kind of ordinary day-to-day work of maintaining and building this institution has been the most gratifying thing for me. WATTENBERG: Finally, what do you see down the road for think tanks? Is this sort of the fifth branch of government? The three that we know of, the press is sometimes called the fourth branch of government. Are think tanks going to become Š or are they - will they become more so sort of the fifth branch of government? DEMUTH: I donÕt think theyÕll be the fifth branch of government, but I think that their role in American politics and public affairs is here to stay. I think that it is innovation in organization. You know, weÕre somewhat like the universities but different. WeÕre managed differently, our finances are different, we donÕt have tenure, we donÕt have faculty committees, weÕre specialized. Each think tank is a school. That is, we have a set of views, so weÕre arguing - the debate is one school versus another. ItÕs been, I think, a very considerable innovation in the way that political research and argument, deliberation on political subjects is carried out and I think the success of the think tanks has not been an accident. It hasnÕt been because two or three rich millionaires put their money into it. It hasnÕt been the sort of thing that you read about it in the papers. ItÕs an important development in the way we organize our politics in the country, and as I look at things on a day-to-day basis at AEI, IÕm always looking for, you know, when are we going to become too big, when are we going to become unmanageable, when are we going to run out of important promising things to do, and I havenÕt seen that day yet. WATTENBERG: Just as a personal aside, when I started Think Tank, which was about a dozen years ago, one of the people here at AEI said, 'You know, youÕre going to do four or five shows, and youÕre going to run out of topics', and you never run out. We have people always coming to us and wanting us to do this, wanting us to do that. Ben, youÕre expressing your own point of view, let them speak, but that was the idea of the show. I didnÕt want to be just a traffic cop. I call myself the immoderator of the program, but there are a lot of people out there with ideas; authors, think tank people, and I just know that for me itÕs been a great adventure. So thank you very much for joining us. WATTENBERG: And thank you. Please join us for a future episode where we will continue our discussion about think tanks. And remember please to send us your comments by e-mail. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, IÕm Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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