Franklin Foer Defends Think Tank Land

Franklin Foer, a Fellow at the New America Foundation (NAF), has recently come out in defense of Washington, DC and its think tank community:

...Ignore, for a minute, the folks who make law on Capitol Hill.  They come and go.  Instead, consider mandarin Washington, the permanent denizens of the think tanks and interest groups, consulting shops and law firms.  There are charlatans in all of those locales, of course,  But they're exceptions.  The city attracts idealists more than any other place.  And over their career, these idealists can become experts.  They come to understand how systems work, how problems can be solved.

Yes, their stock-in-trade is abstractions: statistics, seminars, social science.  But those abstractions - that out-of-touchness, if you will - are the very things that help our technocrats rise above parochialism.  They don't worry about the effects of policies on their neighbor or on the business around the corner.  Sure, our wonks have a point of view, an ideology even.  But they cast their arguments in terms of national interest, and they mean it.

Mr. Foer is currently writing a book about the threat that big technology companies pose to the future of thinking.  He was previously the editor of the New Republic magazine, and has been a staff writer at Slate and New York magazine.

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Rethinking the Think Tank

New America Foundation (NAF) President and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter has just co-authored a piece with Ben Scott of NAF entitled "Rethinking the Think Tank."  Here are some excerpts:

Objective research from think tanks can still play an important role in federal policymaking. But the think tank as a policy institution has not adapted fast enough to escape the dysfunction of Washington. Even superb policy analysis seldom results in policy change. One reason is that expert positions in many debates are alien to the mobilized bases of both parties.  Another is that the desire to score partisan points trumps the effort to get something done irrespective of whether the “right answer” is served up on a silver platter. Meanwhile, a plethora of specialized research institutions funded by trade associations, corporations, and partisan donors on both right and left have led many to question the objectivity of the policy positions adopted.

It is time to propose rethinking the think tank to meet these evolving challenges. The central mission is the same—to help solve public problems—but the form and function of the work must adapt. The theory of action of the traditional think tank is that change comes from the top-down adoption or abolition of laws and regulations. Papers and reports advocating specific changes are, of course, directly influenced by bottom-up political movements, from labor organizing to interest group coalitions. But the energy of such movements is typically harnessed to pass or block laws in a legislative process that is removed from direct engagement with people. Today, that model is too elitist, too narrow, and too slow.

We propose a new model of civic enterprise. “Civic” because it engages citizens as change makers—conscious members of a self-governing polity that expects government to be at least part of the solution to problems that individuals cannot solve on their own. And “enterprise” because of the energy and innovation involved in actually making change on the ground. Civic enterprise blends conventional policy research with local organizing, coalition building, public education, advocacy, and bottom-up projects that generate and test ideas before, during, and after engagement in the policymaking process with government. 

The authors go on to note that the past decades of growth and expansion in the think tank sector have resulted in an explosion or production of white papers.  They say, however, that inevitably, think tanks reflect (and sometimes amplify) the partisanship, compartmentalization, and money in politics.  She adds that even the best think tanks and think tankers are disconnected from the communities that the ideas are developed to serve.

The authors then tout NAF's own community engagement - Opportunity@Work, which they say researches the problem, prototypes solutions, tests them in the field with partners in companies and job centers, and accelerates the process of policy change by demonstrating what is possible.

She also calls out her own think tank, saying this:

Even at an institution called New America, we look much more like old America: largely white, majority male, and almost entirely upper middle class. Think tanks operate with career ladders that recruit in elite universities, privilege advanced degrees, leverage political connections to move people up the ranks, and ultimately perpetuate institutions that look nothing like the rest of America. The problem is evident across the Washington policy ecosystem: the people most engaged in thinking, regulating, and legislating do not actually represent the citizenry.

Ben Scott, one of the co-authors, is a Senior Adviser to to NAF's Open Technology Institute (OTI).   He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung in Berlin, Germany.

More about Opportunity@Work, which was launched by NAF in March 2015, can be found here.  Its co-founders are Byron Auguste (former Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama) and Tyra Mariani (former Chief of Staff to US Deputy Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration).

USG Paying Attention as Think Tanker Warns of WWIII with China

A 40-year-old Senior Fellow at the think tank New America Foundation (NAF) is causing a stir in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies with his predictions about World War III.  Here is more from The Wall Street Journal:

Peter Singer, one of Washington’s pre-eminent futurists, is walking the Pentagon halls with an ominous warning for America’s military leaders: World War III with China is coming.

In meeting after meeting with anyone who will listen, this modern-day soothsayer wearing a skinny tie says America’s most advanced fighter jets might be blown from the sky by their Chinese-made microchips and Chinese hackers easily could worm their way into the military’s secretive intelligence service, and the Chinese Army may one day occupy Hawaii.

The ideas might seem outlandish, but Pentagon officials are listening to the 40-year-old senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.

In hours of briefings, Mr. Singer has outlined his grim vision for intelligence officials, Air Force officers and Navy commanders. What makes his scenarios more remarkable is that they are based on a work of fiction: Mr. Singer’s soon-to-be-released, 400-page techno thriller, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War.”

Pentagon officials typically don’t listen to the doom-and-gloom predictions of fiction writers. But Mr. Singer comes to the table with an unusual track record. He has written authoritative books on America’s reliance on private military contractors, cybersecurity and the Defense Department’s growing dependence on robots, drones and technology.

The Army, Navy and Air Force already have included two of his books on their official reading lists. And he often briefs military leaders on his research.

Here is a bio of Mr. Singer, who was the founding director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution (which Think Tank Watch calls a "Mini-CIA").  He was the youngest person named senior fellow in that think tanks 100 year history.

A copy of the book Ghost Fleet, co-written by August Cole, can be found here.  Mr. Cole is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Here is a Popular Science Q&A about Singer's new book and a possible future war with China.  Here is what Brookings scholar Michael O'Hanlon, a friend and former colleague of Singer, says about the new book.

In related think tank/war news, Michele Flournoy and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post entiteld "Go Big to Destroy the Islamic State."