What’s the best think tank in the United States?
I’m obviously not impartial since I work at the Cato Institute, but here are a few relevant pieces of information.
- When Obama first took office and faced very little opposition, the Cato Institute took the lead against the faux stimulus, rallying hundreds of economists (including Nobel laureates) in opposition to the White House’s primitive Keynesianism.
- The legal argument for restoring the Constitution’s restraints on federal power has been driven by the intellectual work of Cato Institute scholars and adjunct scholars.
- In the battle against Obamacare (as well as the battle against its evil twin, Romneycare), the Cato Institute has been the most dogged, most principled, and most effective fountainhead of ideas and strategies.
But you don’t have to believe me.
The Center for Global Development has just released new research showing that the Cato Institute is America’s most productive and effective think tank.
The CGD’s calculations on based on hard data, looking at how much organizations spend and comparing that to their success with social media, web traffic, links, media exposure, and scholarly citations.
As you can see, the Cato Institute has a comfortable lead over other think tanks.
Much of the credit for Cato’s success belongs to Ed Crane, who founded the organization more than 30 years ago and presided over its growth until his retirement last year.
Under Ed’s leadership, Cato became a major factor in public policy debates. Some say this is because he had a good senior team and hired good people. All that is true (at least I hope since he hired me), but I think another key factor in Cato’s success is that there’s never even the slightest suggestion that what we say and do is influenced by politics.
People can disagree with Cato because they object to limited government and individual liberty, but they always know it’s the place to go for honest and principled analysis.
And that makes me a very lucky guy. Every day, thanks to Cato, I get to fight against wasteful, bloated, and corrupt government.
P.S. While we’re proud of our top performance in the CGD ranking, Cato came in second place in the 32-team DC think tank softball league, losing in the championship game of the tournament, so we know there’s room for improvement.
The fact that there are 32 think tanks in the DC softball league is a bit disconcerting, specifically the “32 think tanks” part, not the softball part. There’s a whole lotta thinkin’ going on.
None of them are effective. Proof? Obama is still President.
Seriously! All the money poured into Heritage et. al. and hundreds of millions poured into insipid 30 second ads the accomplish nothing.
Where is the money needed for the necessary counterpart to Obama’s on-line prowess. Where is the person-to-person GOTV machine?
The left is light years ahead of us in communication. Interestingly, this is because they practice what we preach – the invest political venture capital in (an empower) independent people across the nation, each doing ‘their thing’ to expand the “spending collective.”
We, OTOH, who laud capitalism, fund the same 50-60 do-nothing think tanks and the moribund and Luddite Republican party.
Also, Heartland did more to stop the Global Warming juggernaut with about $1,000,000/ year and a climate conference than the entire collection of “conservative think tanks did with their multi-millions.
The methodology of the study is pretty thin. Let’s do a multi-variant test of 100s of factors and truly measure effect. All of the think tanks put together wouldn’t equal the impact of MSNBC.
Fox & GBTV are a poor substitute for the media colossus, whose impending death has been greatly exaggerated.
Dan,
A good post as usual. I wonder how CATO ranks among charity’s on Charity Navigator. I am pretty sure it has 4 or 5 stars, the highest rating but it would be interesting if Charity Navigator has similar results when compared to other thing tanks.
John
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Bruno Behrand, as you point out quite directly “they practice what we preach – the invest political venture capital in (an empower) independent people across the nation, each doing ‘their thing’ to expand the “spending collective.”.. I was wondering if conservatives and libertarians could do the same. Btw, when you mentioned “media colossus”, it kind of appeared “media circus” to me.. Anyways good point!
Divya,
“Colossal Media Circus” then. Regardless, it would be nice to see our side do that, but they are too busy counting FB followers and twit heads.
Sorry to be so depressing, but a) the mainstream media is still quite powerful, and the left is running circles around us in new media.
Let’s print more policy studies, and then reference them on FB. Hiring 50 kids to get on the phone and actually schedule meetings to organize in the left’s backyard?! Nah! We have to give Dick Armey $8M to go away quietly.
If “effective” = “major policy victory” then…none of them
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