Think Tank Report on Uighur Labor in China Lists Global Brands

Here is more from Reuters:

Tens of thousands of ethnic Uighurs were moved to work in conditions suggestive of “forced labor” in factories across China supplying 83 global brands, an Australian think tank said in a report released on Sunday.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) report, which cited government documents and local media reports, identified a network of at least 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces where more than 80,000 Uighurs from the western region of Xinjiang have been transferred.

“Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor, Uighurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen,” the think-tank said in the introduction to its report. 

The full ASPI report can be read here.

Think Tank: Half of Russians in London Are Spies

The neoconservative think tank Henry Jackson Society (HJS), based in London, has issued a new report entitled "Putin Sees and Hears It All: How Russia's Intelligence Agencies Menace the UK," which notes that up to a half on Russians living in London are spies.  Here are some of the findings:

• Russia’s intelligence and security services are as much as 52 times the size of their British equivalents. 

• There are up to five times the number of Russian case officers in the UK as there were in 2010.  These 200 ‘case officers’ are handling up to 500 agents. 

• Out of an estimated population of 150,000 Russian ex-pats living in London, up to half are said to be FSB, GRU, or SVR informants – potentially, some 75,000 assets. 

• As many as half of Russian Embassy diplomats are actively engaged in intelligence work, with as many – if not more – said to be working in Russia’s Trade Delegation.

Russia's Sputnik took aim at the report, calling it "ludicrous."

In 2017, The Times accused HJS of running an anti-China propaganda campaign after the Japanese embassy gave them a monthly fee of around $13,000.

More Brevity Needed in Think Tank Papers?

Think Tank Watch has read countless think tank papers over 100 pages long and would be happy to do so never again.  Should think tank reports be shorter?  Here is more from the Wall Street Journal about published economic papers being too long:

A backlash is building against inflation—the kind showing up in economics journals.

The average length of a published economics paper has more than tripled over the past four decades, and some academics are sick of wading through them. At this year’s American Economics Association conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Autor compared a 94-page working paper about the minimum wage to “being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat” and started a Twitter hashtag, #ThePaperIsTooDamnedLong.

“It was a very good paper,” Mr. Autor said in a later interview, but it set him off because it represented the “logorrhea of our current state of scholarship.”

Let’s get to the point: Economists want economists to talk less. The AEA announced last year it would launch a journal dedicated to publishing only concise papers, at least by economists’ standards—nothing longer than 6,000 words, or about 15 double-spaced pages. 

Between 1970 and 2017, the average length of papers published in five top-ranked economics journals swelled from 16 pages to 50 pages, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley economists Stefano DellaVigna and David Card. 

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post entitled "Does Anyone Actually Read Think Tank Reports?"

Here is Stephanie Evergreen on why no one is readying your report.

Tom Hashemi says that a forthcoming study will show that the average length of a think tank report in the UK and US is 42.5 pages.

Trump Ain't No Think Tanker (Part IV)

Here is even more evidence that President Donald Trump is not reading your think tank report.  Says the Washington Post:

Trump had little time for in-depth briefings on Afghanistan’s history, its complicated politics or its seemingly endless civil war. Even a single page of bullet points on the country seemed to tax the president’s attention span on the subject, said senior White House officials.

“I call the president the two-minute man,” said one Trump confidant. “The president has patience for a half-page.”

Here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III of "Trump Ain't No Think Tanker."  Most think tank reports are at least several pages long, with many of them running into the dozens or even hundreds of pages.

CAP Gets Revenge Against Trump in New Report

The Clinton-friendly think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) suffered a big blow when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, but it is not giving up its battle to bring down Mr. Trump.  Here is more from BuzzFeed:

A major progressive think tank wants Democrats to stop being shy about accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia.

The Center for American Progress has written a nearly 50-page report for Democrats in Congress, making the case for collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. The report, a draft of which was reviewed by BuzzFeed News ahead of its release Wednesday, makes the bold claim that “it is now clear there was collusion” and “this is the biggest political scandal in American history.”

CAP’s report, which includes several appendices linking to news reports and quotes from the Trump administration, does not include any new information, but it does represent a push for a dramatic change of tone for Democrats in Congress.

The draft of CAP’s report lays out everything the public knows about how the Trump campaign and Russia interacted during the campaign based on information gathered from press reports and congressional testimony. According to CAP, the evidence should be enough for Democrats to argue the campaign colluded with Russia.

CAP’s plan is to deliver the report to “key offices” on the Hill with the hope of giving Democrats the “confidence” to make a collusion argument. Jentleson said Democratic leadership, as well as members of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees in the House and Senate, will be receiving the report.

Update: Here is a link to CAP's new report, entitled "Russiagate: The Depth of Collusion," written by Max Bergmann.

Here is how Fox News describes the report.

CFR's Int'l Report Card: The World is in Steep Decline

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has just released its third annual Report Card on International Cooperation, and things are not looking too good for planet Earth.  Here is more:

The third annual Report Card on International Cooperation sharply downgraded its assessment of efforts to mitigate the world’s most vexing problems in 2016 to a C-, falling from a B grade in 2015.

The Council of Councils, a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) initiative comprising twenty-six major international policy institutes, surveyed the heads of member think tanks to evaluate the world’s performance on ten of the most important transnational challenges of 2016.

"Limited progress in combating climate change and advancing development in 2016 was overwhelmed by dismal failures of international efforts to promote global trade, resolve internal conflicts, and advance cyber governance," said CFR President Richard N. Haass. "Nationalist electoral campaigns throughout the world sailed to victory on promises to retreat from international commitments. This suggests 2017 will face even more fundamental challenges to international cooperation."

The full report card can be found here, and the methodology (including participating think tanks) can be found here.

Why Your Think Tank Report Will Never Get Read

Human attention spans may be shrinking rapidly (Microsoft has noted that our attention spans are down to eight seconds), but that is not the only reason why your think tank report likely will never be read.

Here is more from Joe Miller, the Director of Digital Media Strategy at Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG), who was formerly at the Century Foundation, Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and FactCheck.org:

• If you work anywhere near D.C., you’re probably pretty good at producing reports. In 2015, the U.S. Congress alone officially requested around 4,300 written reports. Tens—perhaps even hundreds—of thousands more are generated inside federal agencies, government contractors, think tanks, and other nonprofits.

• The Internet has broken traditional publishing models. The gatekeepers are gone. Your report now competes with a billion publishers creating content across a million channels.

• The Internet is so much faster at finding answers that we’ve grown a bit impatient. We want answers on the first click, and we don’t want to have to do a lot of reading once we make that click.  That means users don’t much like PDFs.

• If your content is inside a PDF, it's probably not going to get read.  In 2014, the World Bank conducted a study of its website traffic to determine how people were using its reports.  What they found is that 1/3 of its reports had never been downloaded.  Indeed, only 13% of all World Bank reports were downloaded more than 250 times.

• PDFs are hard to scan.  And on the Internet, users love to scan text.  A Nielson study found that users read only about 20% of the text on a given page.

We should note that even if people are reading your report or scanning it (whether PDF or other format), it is very likely that they will still only read just a small portion of the document.

Here is a previous Think Tank Watch report on the overabundance of think tank reports.  [This pic describes how Think Tank Watch feels poring through all of them.]

Here is a recent Think Tank Watch piece on why Donald Trump will probably never read a think tank report during his time in office.

Does this all mean that think tank reports should be shorter?  Do they need to upgrade their products?

Does this mean that think tanks are dead, or just obsolete?

Businessman Threatens to Sue Atlantic Council Over Russia Claims

As if think tanks didn't already have enough to worry about, now there is a new nuisance to agonize over: being sued for defamation.

This is from The Guardian:

Arron Banks, a Ukip donor, has threatened to sue a Washington-based thinktank and three Conservative MPs over claims he is a “pro-Russian actor”. The businessman, who helped bankroll the Brexit campaign, issued a press release saying he was taking legal proceedings against Atlantic Council over its report entitled The Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.

The report mentions him under a heading of “pro-Russian actors” along with figures such as the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage. A spokesman for Banks would not name the three Tory MPs who have also been issued with proceedings.

A spokesman for Atlantic Council said: “We are unaware of any pending legal complaint from Mr Banks. In keeping with our policy on intellectual independence, Atlantic Council reports represent the views of their authors, and not the Atlantic Council as an institution. That said, the Atlantic Council stands by this heavily sourced report.”

The above-mentioned report, The Kremlin's Trojan Horses: Russian Influence in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, can be found here.  It was written by Alina Polyakova, Marlene Laruelle, Stefan Meister, and Neil Barnett.

Dr. Polyakova, Deputy Director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, appears to be the only one of the four authors who has a direct relationship to the Atlantic Council.  Dr. Laruelle is affiliated with the George Washington University (GWU); Dr. Meister is affiliated with the German Council on Foreign Relations; and Mr. Barnett is affiliated with Istok Associates Ltd.

Think Tank Watch will watch this closely, but the only definitive thing we can say for now is that the 27-page think tank report is heavily sourced, with 89 footnotes.