Think Tanks - Producing how we shall think !!!

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Iranian think tanks

Econotrend is an Iranian thinktank headed by Seyed Muhammad Adeli.




Australian think tanks

Most Australian think tanks are based at universities - for example, the Melbourne Institute or are government funded - for example, the Productivity Commission or the CSIRO.

There are also about 20-30 "independent" Australian think tanks, which are funded by private sources. The best-known of these are:

* The Australia Institute
* The Centre for Independent Studies
* The Institute of Public Affairs
* The Lowy Institute

Think tanks play much more limited role on Australian public and business policy making than in the United States. However, in the past decade the number of think tanks has increased substantially.



New Zealand think tanks

The Centre for Strategic Studies New Zealand exists within Victoria University of Wellington. There is also the Maxim Institute in Auckland.



Criticism

Critics such as Ralph Nader have suggested that because of the private nature of the funding of think tanks their results are biased to a varying degree. Some argue members will be inclined to promote or publish only those results that ensure the continued flow of funds from private donors. This risk of distortion similarly threatens the reputation and integrity of organizations such as universities, once considered to stand wholly within the public sector.

Some critics go further to assert think tanks are little more than propaganda tools for promoting the ideological arguments of whatever group established them. They charge that most think tanks, which are usually headquartered in state or national seats of government, exist merely for large-scale lobbying to form opinion in favor of special private interests. They give examples such as organizations calling themselves think tanks having hosted lunches for politicians to present research that critics claim is merely in the political interest of major global interests such as Microsoft, but that the connections to these interests are never disclosed. They charge, as another example, that the RAND Corporation issues research reports on national missile defense that accelerate investment into the very military products being produced by the military manufacturers who control RAND. Critics assert that the status of most think-tanks as non-profit and tax exempt makes them an even more efficient tool to put special interest money to work.

In recent years, many think tanks have begun to promote causes which are contrary to established scientific opinion. For example, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was formed in the mid 1990s as part of the tobacco industry's attempt to cast doubt on EPA studies showing that secondhand smoke could cause cancer.[3] According to an internal memo from Philip Morris, "the credibility of the EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) alone. It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all the EPA's enemies against it at one time." [4]

The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition has also worked to cast doubt on the scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming, as have a number of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute--all of whom receive large contributions from petroleum industry companies like ExxonMobil and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Finally, the influential Discovery Institute has been instrumental in putting the idea of Intelligent design into public debate, even though most biologists do not accept the theory as scientific.

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Brain Trust



The "Brain Trust" or "Brains Trust" was the name given to a group of diverse academics, including economists and professors who served as advisors to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the early period of his tenure. The group never met together but acted as informal advisors; having an academic team was first suggested in March 1932 by Roosevelt's legal counsel Samuel Rosenman. In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson had assembled The Inquiry, a group of academic advisors he brought to the Versailles Conference. The Brain Trust in 1932 to 1933 included Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle, all professors at Columbia University. Later added were attorney Basil O'Connor and Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School

These men played a key role in shaping the policies of the First New Deal. Although they never met together as a group, they each had Roosevelt's ear. Other academic advisors to the New Deal were often called "brain trusters". Many newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons ridiculed them as impractical idealists. Moley broke with Roosevelt and became a sharp critic of the New Deal from the right.

The concept of Roosevelt's brains trust was an inspiration for The Roosevelt Institution, a student think tank trying to once again move ideas from academia into the policy discourse.

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Think tanks
From SourceWatch


A Think Tank is an organization that claims to serve as a center for research and/or analysis of important public issues. In reality, many think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors; in the words of Yellow Times.org (http://www.yellowtimes.org/) columnist John Chuckman, "phony institutes where ideologue~propagandists pose as academics ... [into which] money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising's suffocation of genuine debate". [1] (http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.p...thread&order=0)

Of course, some think tanks are more legitimate than that. Private funding does not necessarily make a researcher a shill, and some think-tanks produce worthwhile public policy research. In general, however, research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.

"We've got think tanks the way other towns have firehouses," Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach says. "This is a thoughtful town. A friend of mine worked at a think tank temporarily and the director told him when he entered, 'We are white men between the ages of 50 and 55, and we have no place else to go.'"

"In 1970, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a fateful memo to the National Chamber of Commerce saying that all of our best students are becoming anti-business because of the Vietnam War, and that we needed to do something about it. Powell's agenda included getting wealthy conservatives to set up professorships, setting up institutes on and off campus where intellectuals would write books from a conservative business perspective, and setting up think tanks. He outlined the whole thing in 1970. They set up the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and the Manhattan Institute after that. There are many others, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which date from the 1940s." --George Lakoff [2] (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/r...7_lakoff.shtml)

Think tanks are funded primarily by large businesses and major foundations. They devise and promote policies that shape the lives of everyday Americans: Social Security privatization, tax and investment laws, regulation of everything from oil to the Internet. They supply experts to testify on Capitol Hill, write articles for the op-ed pages of newspapers, and appear as TV commentators. They advise presidential aspirants and lead orientation seminars to train incoming members of Congress.

Think tanks have a decided political leaning. There are twice as many conservative think tanks as liberal ones, and the conservative ones generally have more money. This is no accident, as one of the important functions of think tanks is to provide a backdoor way for wealthy business interests to promote their ideas or to support economic and sociological research not taking place elsewhere that they feel may turn out in their favor. Conservative think tanks also offer donors an opportunity to support conservative policies outside academia, which during the 1960s and 1970s was accused of having a strong "collectivist" bias.

"Modern think tanks are nonprofit, tax-exempt, political idea factories where donations can be as big as the donor's checkbook and are seldom publicized," notes Tom Brazaitis, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Technology companies give to think tanks that promote open access to the internet. Wall Street firms donate to think tanks that espouse private investment of retirement funds." So much money now flows in, that the top 20 conservative think tanks now spend more money than all of the "soft money" contributions to the Republican party.

In the wake of the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 Democratic-inclined supporters sought to bolster funding for centre-left think tanks. "Scores of the US's richest people have pledged $1 million or more towards a new attempt to reinvigorate the American left and counter the powerful Republican political machine," writes David Teather in The GUardian (UK). "The money will be funnelled through an organisation called the Democracy Alliance which, according to a report in the Washington Post, will help fund a network of thinktanks and advocacy groups seeking to halt the shift to the cultural and political right." Democratic strategist Rob Stein, who organized the effort, thinks "there is a big imbalance in the amount of cash that goes into left and rightwing thinktanks. Over the past two years, he said, think tanks pushing the conservative agenda had received $295 million, while leftwing institutions were given just $75 million." [3] (http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...544680,00.html)

A think tank's resident experts carry titles such as "senior fellow" or "adjunct scholar," but this does not necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise. Outside funding can corrupt the integrity of academic institutions. The same corrupting influences affect think tanks, only more so.

Think tanks are like universities minus the students and minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is often reversed at most policy-driven think tanks. As writer Jonathan Rowe has observed, the term "think" tanks is a misnomer. His comment was directed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, but it applies equally well to many other think tanks, regardless of ideology: "They don't think; they justify."

A Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) is a special category of think tank. As described by the National Science Foundation [4] (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf02321/secta.htm), FFRDCs are "R&D-performing organizations that are exclusively or substantially financed by the Federal Government and are supported by the Federal Government either to meet a particular R&D objective or, in some instances, to provide major facilities at universities for research and associated training purposes. Each center is administered either by an industrial firm, a university, or another nonprofit institution."

The Department of Defense (DOD) sponsors ten FFRDCs, which are listed below with other North American think tanks. Many of these DOD FFRDCs, and the institutions that operate them, have used their privileged status, and tax dollars, to venture beyond their charters. Such ventures have incurred the wrath of the Professional Services Council (PSC), an association of for-profit consulting firms, which has fought the aggrandizement of FFRDCs since the early 1970s. PSC's task force on FFRDCs "is charged with the challenging task of containing [FFRDCs] and similar quasi-governmental entities that benefit from sole-source contracting or otherwise are subsidized unfairly by the federal government..." [5] (http://www.pscouncil.org/committees/ffrdctf.asp). The efforts have paid off, to some extent, in tighter controls on the funding of FFRDCs and the types of research they are allowed to undertake.

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US Examples

* Accuracy in Media
* The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
* Aerospace FFRDC at The Aerospace Corp.
* Air Hygiene Foundation
* Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
* American Academy in Berlin
* American Academy in Rome
* American Academy of Diplomacy, The
* American Beverage Institute
* American Council for Capital Formation
* American Council on Germany
* American Council on Science and Health
* The American Councils on Foreign Relations
* American Defense International
* American Ditchley Foundation
* American Enterprise Institute
* American Eugenics Society
* American Family Foundation
* American Foreign Policy Council
* American Industrial Health Council
* American Jewish Council
* American Life League
* American Majority Institute
* American Petroleum Institute
* American Policy Center
* American Security Council
* ANSER Institute for Homeland Security
* Ariel Center for Policy Research
* Arroyo Center (FFRDC) at RAND Corp.
* Atlantic Council of the United States
* Atlantic Institute / Atlantic Institute of International Affairs
* Aspen Institute / Aspen Strategy Group
* Baker Institute for Public Policy
* Bilderberg
* Morton Blackwell Leadership Institute
* Brookings Institution
* The Business Council
* Business Council for Sustainable Development
* C3I FFRDC at MITRE Corp.
* Campaign Finance Institute
* Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
* Capital Research Center
* Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
* Carter Center
* Catalyst Institute
* Cato Institute
* Center for American Progress
* Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies
* Center for Consumer Freedom
* Center for Defense Information
* Center for Democracy
* Center for Digital Democracy
* Center for Environmental Education Research
* Center for Global Development
* Center for Governmental Studies
* Center for International Policy
* Center for Jewish and Christian Values
* Center for Middle East Policy at Hudson Institute
* Center for Middle East Public Policy (CMEPP); RAND Corporation
* Center for National Policy
* Center for Naval Analyses (FFRDC) at The CNA Corp.
* Center for New American Century
* Center for Peace and Security Studies
* Center for Regulatory Effectiveness
* Center for Research on Population and Security
* Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
* Center for Responsive Politics
* Center for Security Policy
* Center for State Homeland Security
* Center for Strategic and International Studies
* Center for the American Founding
* Center for the New West
* Center for the Study of Terrorism
* Center for the Study of the Presidency
* Center for The 21st Century
* Center of International Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
* Century Foundation (The); formerly The Twentieth Century Fund
* Chicago Council on Foreign Relations
* Christian Coalition of America
* Citizens for a Sound Economy
* Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy
* Climate Council
* Commonwealth Institute
* Competitive Enterprise Institute
* Concord Coalition
* Conference Board
* Congressional Institute
* Consumer Alert
* Consumers' Research
* Contributions Watch
* Core Knowledge Foundation
* Corporate Europe Observatory
* Council for Government Reform
* Council for National Policy
* Council for Responsible Nutrition
* Council for Solid Waste Solutions
* Council for Tobacco Research
* Council of American Muslims for Understanding
* The Council on American-Islamic Relations
* Council on Foreign Relations
* Council on Middle Eastern Affairs
* Council on the Americas
* Economic Club of New York
* Economic Strategy Institute
* Employment Policy Foundation
* Employment Policies Institute
* Empower America
* Environmental Issues Council
* Ethics and Public Policy Center
* Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
* Federation of American Scientists
* Feminist Majority Foundation
* Foreign Policy Association
* Foundation for Clean Air Progress
* The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
* Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment
* Free Congress Education and Research Foundation
* Free Congress Foundation
* Freedom Forum
* Freedom House, Inc.
* Frontiers of Freedom
* George C. Marshall Institute
* Global Action Plan
* Global Climate Coalition
* Global Climate Information Project
* Global Compact Partners
* Goldwater Institute
* Gorbachev Foundation of North America
* Greening Earth Society
* Healthcare Leadership Council
* Heartland Institute
* Heritage Foundation
* Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace* Iran Policy Committee
* Israel Policy Forum
* Japan Policy Research Institute
* The Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development
* Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
* John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies
* Lexington Institute
* Lincoln Laboratory (FFRDC) at M.I.T.
* Logistics Management Institute
* Ludwig von Mises Institute
* Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
* George C. Marshall Institute
* McKinsey Global Institute
* MEMRI: Middle East Media Research Institute
* Middle East Forum
* The Middle East Institute, School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia University
* Middle East Policy Council
* Mountain States Legal Foundation
* National Anxiety Center
* National Bureau of Economic Research
* National Center for Policy Analysis
* National Center for Privitization
* National Center for Public Policy Research
* National Council Against Health Fraud
* National Council on Sustainable Development
* National Defense Research Institute (FFRDC) at RAND Corp.
* National Democratic Institute
* National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
* National Environmental Policy Institute
* National Institute for Public Policy
* National Journalism Center
* National Resources Defense Council
* National Strategy Information Center
* National Urban League
* National Wilderness Institute
* New America Foundation
* New Atlantic Initiative
* New Citizenship Project
* New World Foundation
* Nixon Center
* Nuclear Threat Initiative
* Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine
* Pacific Institute
* Pacific Research Institute
* Panetta Institute for Public Policy
* Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University
* Peacekeeping Institute
* PeaceNow.org
* People for the American Way
* Pew Global Attitudes Project
* Philanthropy Roundtable
* Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research
* Political Economy Research Center
* Potomac Institute on Public Policy
* Power and Interest News Report
* Private Sector Council
* Progress & Freedom Foundation
* Progressive Government Institute
* Progressive Policy Institute
* Project Air Force (FFRDC) at RAND Corp.
* Project on Defense Alternatives
* Project for the New American Century
* Property and Environment Research Center
* Pulse of Europe
* RAND Corporation
* Reason, Inc.
* The Reason Foundation
* Regulatory Impact Analysis Project, Inc.
* Rockridge Institute
* Rocky Mountain Institute
* Ronald Reagan Legacy Project

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* The Roosevelt Institution
* Saudi Institute/Saudi Information Agency
* Science and Environmental Policy Institute
* Small Business Survival Committee
* Software Engineering Institute (FFRDC) at Carnegie Mellon University
* Southern Poverty Law Center
* Southern Research Institute
* Stanley Foundation
* StateofHumanity.org
* Statistical Assessment Service
* Synergos Institute
* United States Institute of Peace/U.S. Institute of Peace
* Urban Institute
* US-India Institute for Strategic Policy
* The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
* The Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy
* Washington Legal Foundation
* Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), Harvard University
* Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
* World Affairs Council, Washington, DC
* World Economic Forum
* World Water Council
* Workplace Health & Safety Council
* Zionist Organization of America






Global examples

* Global Business Dialogue on e-Commerce/GBDe
* World Business Council on Sustainable Development/WBCSD




Canadian Examples

* Atlantic Institute for Market Studies
* Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies
* The Fraser Institute
* Frontier Centre for Public Policy




UK Examples

* Adam Smith Institute
* Asia-Pacific Foundation
* The Bow Group
* Catalyst
* Centre for European Reform
* Centre for Policy Studies
* Centre for Reform
* Civitas
* Crime and Society Foundation
* Demos
* Fabian Society
* Forum for the Future
* Foreign Policy Centre
* Globalisation Institute
* Institute of Economic Affairs
* Institute for Fiscal Studies
* Institute of Ideas
* International Institute for Strategic Studies [
* Institute for Public Policy Research
* Localis
* mi2g
* New Economics Foundation
* New Local Government Network
* New Frontiers Foundation
* New Health Network
* New Politics Network
* Politeia
* Reform
* Relationships Foundation
* Royal Institute for International Affairs
* Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies
* The Scientific Alliance
* Social Affairs Unit
* Social Issues Research Centre
* Social Market Foundation
* Tavistock Institute for Human Behavior
* The Work Foundation
* Young Fabians
* Young Foundation



Scottish Examples

* The Centre for the Study of Public Policy
* The Centre for Scottish Public Policy
* Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
* David Hume Institute
* The International Futures Forum
* The John Wheatley Centre
* The Policy Institute
* The Scottish Council Foundation



European Examples

* Afidora
* Brussels European and Global Economic Laboratory
* Centre for the New Europe
* Civita
* Copenhagen Institute
* European Science and Environment Forum
* Edmund Burke Foundation
* Studienzentrum Weikersheim
* Federation of European Employers
* Instytut Sobieskiego
* Istituto Bruno Leoni
* Libres
* Open Republic Institute
* Real Instituto Elcano
* CASE - the Center for Social and Economic Research
* Timbro
* US Matters Club (Poland)



Australian Examples

* Australia Institute
* Australian APEC Study Centre
* Australian Business Foundation
* Australian Fabian Society
* Asia Institute
* Brisbane Institute
* Committee for Economic Development of Australia
* Centre for Independent Studies
* Chifley Research Centre
* Evatt Foundation
* Institute for Private Enterprise
* Institute of Public Affairs
* Lowy Institute
* Menzies Research Centre
* Network Insight Institute
* OzProspect
* Page Research Centre
* Sydney Institute

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Etymology and usage

Until the 1940s, most think-tanks were known only by the name of the institution. During the Second World War, think tanks were referred to as "brain boxes" after the slang term for the skull. The phrase "think tank" in wartime American slang referred to rooms in which strategists discussed war planning. The first recorded use of the phrase to refer to modern think tanks was in 1959, and by the 1960s the term was commonly used to describe RAND and other groups assisting the armed forces. In recent times, the phrase "think tank" has become applied to a wide range of advice-giving institutions, and there are no precise definitions of the term. Marketing or public relations organizations, especially of an international character, sometimes refer to themselves as think tanks, for example.