Urban Institute Helping DC Get Rich

Washington, DC is using one of the hundreds of think tanks within its borders to help help grow its economy.  Here is more from The Washington Post:

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Tuesday her five-year economic development plan to make the city more competitive and more inclusive. She wants to grow the city’s private-sector economy by 20 percent to $100 billion and reduce unemployment to below 10 percent in every ward and across racial demographics and educational attainment levels in the next five years.

The mayor’s 105-page plan focuses on supporting the industries that have served the city well so far (hospitality and tourism, real estate, health care, etc.) and on creating new opportunities in areas that would build on existing market strengths (cybersecurity technology, health-care data analysis, autonomous vehicle innovations, etc.).

The Urban Institute helped the city develop the economic growth indicators for the plan.

The Urban Institute, a think tank founded by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 to focus on social and economic policy, gets around 43 percent of its funding from the federal government and another 40 percent from foundations.  The remainder comes from a mix of its endowment fund, nonprofits, universities, state and local governments, corporations, individuals, international organizations, and foreign entities.

Specific funders include: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundations, Citi Foundation, ConAgra Food Foundation, World Bank, H&R Block, MITRE Corporation, E*TRADE Financial, Goldman Sachs, Hudson Institute, Medtronic, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Quicken Loans, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, and the state of Hawaii.

Federal donors include the International Revenue Service (IRS) and the Library of Congress, as well as the US Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, State, Justice, Education, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Washington, DC = Center of Think Tank Universe

Peter Singer, Director of the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the think tank, wrote this peice entitled "Washington's Think Tanks: Factories to Call Our Own" in 2010.  Here are some excerpts:

Travel down Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest DC and you’ll find yourself in the heart of an industry that was, when it began, unique to the nation’s capital. The imposing facades of the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies bear little resemblance to the old steel mills of Pittsburgh, but they are factories all the same—producing an endless stream of books, policy papers, reports, analyses, and commentary on everything from health care to taxes to defense.

Washington’s “ideas” economy, based in its think tanks and universities, has made the city an intellectual leader. In 2009, the University of Pennsylvania conducted a survey of the world’s think tanks. It identified 6,305 in 169 countries. At the center of this universe was Washington. Some 393 think tanks were located in the District, more than in any other city in the world; DC is home to about one-fifth of all the think tanks in the United States. Another 149 are in Virginia and Maryland. With budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to $80 million, the ideas industry is a huge driver of the local economy.

And it’s not just a matter of numbers. When the think tanks in the survey were rated for the influence of their work, nine of the top ten in the United States had offices in Washington; the Hoover Institution at Stanford University—staffed with many DC refugees—was the only non-DC think tank to make the top ten.

The latest University of Pennsylvania think tank rankings released in 2015 say that Washington, DC has a whopping 396 think tanks (and Think Tank Watch knows that in an inaccurate figure and there are actually more).  The runner-up in Massachusetts, which "only" has 176 think tanks.  Combined, Maryland and Virginia, which surround DC, have 155 think tanks.