A panel by the influential Brookings Institution
If you and I ever meet, remind me to show you my inbox, ooh-er. It is not a beautiful place, nor is it, at first glance, special. Scroll through a day or two, however, and what you will see is a relief map of the West, with all its current malformations.
There are vouchers for discounts to garments already improbably cheap. There is a Friendly Reminder from my corporate creditor. Every so often, I receive promises of death/rape, but these have diminished in private number now that they can be easily published. Cheap goods. High debt. Threat stripped of value, like so much else, by progress and oversupply. Your inbox may reflect the present with comparable accuracy. But perhaps with fewer reminders from that other modern menace: think tanks.
The name of the scholar who coined the phrase “policy-based evidence” escapes me. They were, nonetheless, very clever and offer concise description not only of major party politics, but the think tank’s current function. Two things often intimately linked.
Last week, the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA) — whose published fellows, I have begun to suspect, are chosen for their ability to bore readers — offered “evidence” that we are all becoming more prosperous, that company tax is an evil only rivalled by government spending on useful things, etc. The Age published it. Presumably, to “balance” a slightly different account published in The Age of that same evidence, offered by another think tank, the McKell Institute.
It is no secret that the IPA exists largely to remind snobs in the Liberal Party to pronounce “von Mises” correctly. And McKell doesn’t conceal that its latest report was compiled with advice from Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh. Yet, these think tanks still manage to make the slight economic disagreement between Labor and the Libs, continued for decades, newsworthy.
You got your unvarnished neoliberalism and your compassionate neoliberalism. Both the “progressive” McKell paper and its “free market” IPA response are united in their basic understanding. They both say that everyday Australians need good wages to safeguard their prosperity — the IPA claims its difference by making stagnant wages move with some gini co-efficient magic. They both overlook the threat posed to prosperity by private household debt. A factor about which even the International Monetary Fund warns. What sort of think tank are you if you cannot keep the pace of the IMF, itself a think tank empowered to lend? A think tank in a nation yet to develop wide suspicion of think tanks.
[Rundle: meet the think tank guru looking for love from Labor]
As the regular recipient of Australian think tank spam, I have learned suspicion. Bit late, though. I am hardly among the first to identify the failure of these institutions to produce new ideas. They serve to endorse the old idea of power.
In 2005, geographer David Harvey follows the money that founded conservative US think tanks, such as the formerly influential Heritage Foundation. Australian political economist Damien Cahill noted local bankrolling of neoliberal “thought” years ago. In 2011, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis declared that think tanks themselves “made thinking impossible”. This is not the conclusion of a scholar, which is probably why it grabs me: think tanks are doomed in time to thoughtlessness.
There are think tanks of the present that can claim a thinking past. The colossally influential Brookings Institution once helped the US government think its way out of laissez-faire economics. Now, the newest thought it will indulge is that upheld by McKell: wages are quite low and we should encourage firms, those things that maintain themselves by producing profit, to do something about it. The people at Brookings, who now insist that a profoundly financialised global economy reined itself in years ago, can’t all be so thick that they believe their own economic prescriptions, which have generally been of the “keep on trucking, Mr President” kind.
Think tanks, whether progressive or conservative, largely show no more evidence of intellectual strain than an email aggressor. The death threat has now become predictable, for reasons I am yet unable to fully explain. The unthinking think tank now predictably serves power, for reasons you probably can.
Any organisation committed from the outset to gradualism itself gradually slows to inertia. It develops an unforeseen function, which, in the case of think tanks, is to give political and/or financial leaders prestige and/or temporary employment. Harvey and Cahill have it right when they tell us to follow the funding. Curtis has it right when he tells us to follow the history. Give a small group too much time, money and power, and they will eventually learn to stop innovating.
It’s the Brookings Institution, not Institute – easy enough to google. Only a minor matter but a distraction. David Whittingham.
Far too kind MzRaz on TTTs (toxic thought tanks) but your phrase making pinged the fate of Labor under (sic!) bumBoil Shlernt – “gradualism itself gradually slows to inertia..“.
Leave the deadheads to bury the, unfortunately not yet, dead.
Vote Green.
“You got your unvarnished neoliberalism and your compassionate neoliberalism. Both the “progressive” McKell paper and its “free market” IPA response are united in their basic understanding. They both say that everyday Australians need good wages to safeguard their prosperity — the IPA claims its difference by making stagnant wages move with some gini co-efficient magic.”
A useful illustration of the Gini coefficient is to consider a Lorenz Curve for a given function. In the case of the Gini it is a number between zero and one; zero implying equality and 1 implying utter inequality. The coefficient for both Australia and the USA is 0.3 (to one decimal place); in other words : relative inequality. The coefficient is a measure of “what is”; it is not susceptible to movement other than by rather extreme government economic policy directed to either equality or inequality.
> They both overlook the threat posed to prosperity by private household debt.
on the contrary they both (implicitly) encourage it but what is overlooked is that the consumers are already, (by and large) maxed-out.
” Now, the newest thought it will indulge is that upheld by McKell: wages are quite low and we should encourage firms, those things that maintain themselves by producing profit, to do something about it.”
Low-end wages & salaries are not so much low as static. Moreover, the workforce has never been more compliant or fearful of retrenchment or job-loss by any cause. Consider negative inflation as an illustration. In such an environment consumers would wait until prices had declined prior to purchasing – but such in itself is a (theoretical)
never-ending spiral. Clearly Aggregate Demand would drop through the floor and the most avid supply-sider would not advocate such a state of affairs. Lastly, on the point, firms (via tax cuts or anything else) do not dig economies out of recessions or depressions. Only governments can do that. “Firms” did not “save the day” over 2007-8-9 when the remainder of the world dropped into recesson. Rudd, et all, albeit without a complete understanding of Keynesianism, prevented the recession
“Think tanks, whether progressive or conservative, largely show no more evidence of intellectual strain than an email aggressor.”
Such is the “hard way” to appraise think tanks. The easy way is to identify their creator(s) and their composition. Then one can predict with near-certainty as to what will be recommended (to the government?) in the next White paper or Black Paper or Purple Paper. The “trail” is near-identical from Muldoon in the latish 70s to where we are now.
Of course it is important to provide the “think tank” with the status of a Priesthood (with the composition looking about right : see the photo suppled) but such is a mere detail.
Your reference to von Mises reminded me of Buchanan, Friedman and the neo-liberal libertarians, as featured in Nancy MacLean’s excellent “Democracy in Chains”. Is it only me who suspects the IPA receives funding from the Koch brothers and their ilk, as do their ideological kin in the US?
I think Bernardi definitely has links to the Koch brothers in a long circuitious rout of funding.
Make over Bernardi was the second candidate on the Liberal Party’s South Australian senate ticket in 2016 and received the magnificent amount of 2043 first-preference votes. He jumped the shark shortly thereafter and Lyle Shelton is the latest Inquisitor to join his bestial hate fest.
Bernardi has links to the pro-gun / pro-tobacco US Tea Party affiliated A.L.E.C.
Bernardi is/was one of several foreign persons who sits with ALEC.
Cory Bernardi was/is turning up at ALEC and networking with the Astroturfers pets the Tea party. B
Bernardi was the Coalition’s representative at the Tea Party’s tea ceremony run by right wing conservative religious nutters promoted heavily by Fox News.
ALEC is a corporate bill mill.
It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that.
Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line.
Corporations fund almost all of ALEC’s operations.
They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills.
Bernardi is listed as an “international delegate” to the American Legislative Exchange Council
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cory_Bernardi
Talk about “think tanks” always reminds me of that wonderful book of essays written last century by the academic Alex Carey (father of Gabrielle), called “Taking the Risk Out Of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda in the US and Australia”, UNSW Press. I think he was the one who coined the term “treetops propaganda”, as distinct from “grassroots propaganda”. The raison d’être of think tanks is treetops propaganda. That is, to influence the opinions of the elites – politicians, journalists, high ranking public servants, business leaders, and so forth.