Supply Side Economics Part 2: Why it Persists
Supply Side Economics
In the first post, I gave a systematic explanation of why I think supply-side economics should be rejected on theoretical and empirical grounds. In this second post, I want to explain why the ideology persists among the public despite what I see as a near-consensus among economists that its strongest claims are untenable. There is a plausible historical and cultural story for why supply-side and “free-market” ideology became so entrenched in public discourse, as well as identifiable causal mechanisms through which that ideology diffuses through social networks. This post therefore turns from the theoretical and empirical critique in Part I to two related questions: where this ideology came from, and how it is reproduced and diffused.
The historical argument proceeds in three steps: first, what Oreskes and Conway argue in The Big Myth and how it connects to market fundamentalism and supply-side economics; second, what Kruse argues in One Nation Under God and how it adds a religious and moral overlay in which regulation can be framed as ungodly or “socialist”; and third, how the two accounts together explain the appeal and entrenchment of supply-side and anti-regulation ideas despite their economic weaknesses.
I. The Historical Construction of Market Fundamentalism
Certain economic beliefs repeatedly cluster with particular religious and group identities, and policy responses are often highly predictable across those groups. The same is true of anti-regulatory positions such as opposition to climate regulation. These patterns did not emerge entirely by accident; much of the underlying ideological association was deliberately cultivated. I’ll explain that process in three layers.
The Big Myth: The “Free Market” as Civic Religion
Oreskes and Conway’s core claim in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is that, over roughly a century,, U.S. business interests funded and orchestrated a large, coordinated propaganda campaign to convince Americans that markets are natural and self-regulating, government intervention is inherently suspect, and “economic freedom” (laissez-faire) is the essence of American freedom. They argue this is not an organic conclusion of economics or history, but a deliberately constructed ideology they call “market fundamentalism.” [1] Naomi Oreskes has summarized the “big myth” in three parts:
- The idea that the “free market” exists on its own, independent of human-made rules, rather than as a human institution built by law and policy;
- The idea that free markets are infallible—always the best way to solve social and economic problems;
- The idea that freedom itself requires free markets, such that any significant regulation risks tyranny. [62]
The book starts in the early 20th century, focusing on National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and National Electric Light Association (NELA) as early champions of anti-regulation ideology, especially against things like public power and rural electrification. [1] NAM promoted the idea of a “tripod of freedom” – the claim that political freedom and representative democracy cannot exist without “economic freedom” understood as minimal government interference in markets. So already by the New Deal era, you have a meme that links regulation → threat to freedom, not just “efficiency loss.” [1] This is exactly the false dichotomy mentioned in the previous post: any state action is framed not as correcting market failure, but as stepping onto a slippery slope toward tyranny.
The mid-century chapters trace how business groups scaled this up after the New Deal, beginning with the funding of free-market intellectuals and institutions. Business patrons bankrolled economists and thinkers who were out of step with the then-dominant institutional and New Deal consensus (e.g., Mises, Hayek, later Friedman; plus groups like FEE). [1] This created a parallel intellectual infrastructure giving “academic” legitimacy to a very rigid laissez-faire line. Education campaigns followed. Corporate-backed materials for schools and universities; textbooks, teaching kits, and curricula that subtly portrayed government as inefficient and “the market” as the source of freedom and prosperity. [1] Entertainment and popular culture were also deliberately targeted. Business-backed radio shows, films, and television programs (e.g., General Electric Theater with a young Ronald Reagan) that told stories in which heroic entrepreneurs and “free enterprise” were equated with American identity, while government was faceless or menacing. [1] Finally, the campaign extended into religious and civic life, helping to sanctify the ideology. Partnerships with clergy, business civic groups, and later religious broadcasters to blend free-market ideology with morality and patriotism—this is the bridge into Kruse’s territory. The point Oreskes and Conway are making is that ordinary people didn’t wake up and independently decide that deregulated markets are the pure form of freedom. They had been immersed for decades in a climate shaped by extremely well-funded campaigns telling them that.
By the time you get to Carter/Reagan/Clinton, they argue the basic premise that “markets know best” and government is inherently clumsy or dangerous has become bipartisan common sense, even as Democrats retain some commitment to regulation and welfare. [1] Deregulation and privatization are reframed as “modernization” rather than ideological gambits. This helps explain why supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and general suspicion of the state can be sold to the public as technocratic common sense, not as radical experiments, even though from the standpoint of modern economics (institutions, capabilities, endogenous growth) they’re incredibly partial and skewed.
Oreskes and Conway tie market fundamentalism to later anti-science politics. If the myth says “markets solve problems; government breaks things,” then scientific findings that justify regulation (climate science, environmental health, product safety, public health) become political threats. Oreskes and Conway argue that the same network of funders and institutions that promoted free-market fundamentalism later underwrote organized denial around smoking, climate, and other regulation-triggering science—this is the continuity with their earlier Merchants of Doubt. [1] They explicitly connect this myth to modern failures on climate policy, COVID-19 public health measures, and opioids and product safety in general—cases where a reflexive hostility to regulation blocked effective responses. [1] The Big Myth is basically a historical explanation of why so many non-economists believe the things we have been critiquing: that markets are natural, self-regulating, and separate from the state; that any regulation is “socialism” or at least a step toward it, and that government cannot be an enabling institution for markets. It’s the story of how those beliefs were manufactured and laundered into “common sense.”
One Nation Under God: Sacralizing Markets and Small Government
Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America offers a parallel but complementary account: not just free markets, but Christian America as a corporate political project. Kruse’s central claim: the modern idea that the United States is, and always has been, a self-evidently “Christian nation” is largely a 20th-century construct, created when business elites and conservative clergy partnered to fight FDR’s New Deal and the expanding welfare state. He traces this back to the 1930s–1950s, rather than to the Founders, and emphasizes the role of corporate money and PR in fusing Christianity, patriotism, and free enterprise. [2] So where Oreskes/Conway describe the economic–ideological campaign, Kruse describes the religious–ideological one. A substantial part of Kruse’s narrative revolves around Rev. James W. Fifield Jr. (“the Apostle to Millionaires”) and his organization Spiritual Mobilization, founded in the 1930s with strong corporate backing. [3] Spiritual Mobilization preached a “Christian libertarianism” that linked faith with free enterprise and small government, denounced the New Deal as “pagan statism,” and insisted that the only political position compatible with Christianity was laissez-faire. [4] Fifield and his backers recruited business leaders from GM, GE, Standard Oil, etc., by pitching the welfare state as sinful because it displaced individual responsibility and free enterprise, and used slogans like “Freedom Under God,” making it sound as though reliance on government was literally a theological error. [3] This helps explain the later framing in which “any regulation or social program is not just inefficient but un-Christian,” which later morphs into “regulation = socialism/tyranny” in public discourse.
Kruse shows how corporate money funded radio programs, magazines, and sermon kits for pastors (e.g., Spiritual Mobilization’s Faith and Freedom magazine and radio program The Freedom Story), and national events like “Freedom Under God” celebrations and “Independence Sunday,” where churches were encouraged to preach free enterprise and anti-statism as Christian duties. [5] So instead of economists talking about externalities and institutional design, people hear moral language like “reliance on government versus reliance on God,” spiritual stakes like big government as idolatry or “pagan statism,” and national identity: free enterprise and Christianity as the twin pillars of “the American way.” You can see how that primes people to treat regulation not as a technical fix to market failure, but as a moral and spiritual threat.
Kruse then tracks how this corporate-religious fusion shapes national symbolism under Eisenhower: “Under God” added to the Pledge of Allegiance (1954), “In God We Trust” adopted as the national motto and printed on currency, and high-profile National Prayer Breakfasts, with business and political elites deeply involved. [2] Eisenhower himself wasn’t a pure libertarian ideologue, but these moves cemented the idea that: to be American was to be Christian, to be free, and to support small government and free enterprise. Kruse then shows how later figures (especially Nixon and then the modern Religious Right) weaponized this merged Christian–free market identity for partisan ends, making resistance to regulation and social programs a kind of religious loyalty test. [6] Again, this is exactly the cultural backdrop for why “any regulation = socialism” lands so emotionally with some people: it’s not just policy; it’s tied to God, country, and identity.
How the Two Accounts Fit Together
Placed alongside the earlier theoretical critique, these accounts offer a coherent explanation for why bad economics can be so politically sticky. From The Big Myth, business campaigns told Americans: free markets are natural, self-regulating, and the essence of freedom. Government is something outside that natural order that “intrudes.” [1] From One Nation Under God, religious campaigns sacralized that story: free enterprise is God’s will, the welfare/regulatory state is “pagan statism,” and Christian duty requires suspicion of big government. [4] So instead of a technical question—“what institutional mix best approximates competitive markets and supplies public and commons goods?”—people are offered a simple moral binary: God, freedom, and markets vs sin, slavery, and the state. Once that’s in place, supply-side economics and “regulation = communism” don’t have to be logically convincing; they’re morally resonant.
Oreskes and Conway show how corporate campaigns deliberately framed any regulation (whether it was antitrust, safety standards, or environmental rules) as a threat to freedom and prosperity, and how they erased the distinction between regulation that makes markets work better (antitrust, disclosure, rules against fraud) and regulation that might genuinely be heavy-handed or misguided. [1] Kruse shows how religious messaging reinforced this as “reliance on God and free enterprise” versus “reliance on the state,” with no conceptual space for “rules that make markets fair and functional.” [7] That helps explain why the very basic economist point— “We need regulation to approximate competitive conditions and provide public and commons goods”—can sound, to people soaked in these narratives, like a dangerous slide toward socialism, even if the regulation is literally pro-competition and pro-market.
Both books stress that this wasn’t a one-off PR stunt but the building of a stable ecosystem: business associations (NAM, etc.), specialized think tanks and foundations (FEE, and later a wider conservative/market-fundamentalist infrastructure), funded chairs, scholars, and books to provide an “academic” backbone, curricula and media tailored to children, churches, and families, and DC policy networks translating ideas into things like supply-side tax packages. [1] This ecosystem constantly generates “off the shelf” arguments for tax cuts, deregulation, and hostility to regulators like the SEC or EPA; and keeps repeating myths about the New Deal, regulation, and markets until they harden into background assumptions. So even when the empirical record of supply-side policies is weak or negative, the narrative infrastructure keeps them politically alive.
They tie anti-regulation attitudes to science denial and policy paralysis, explicitly connecting market fundamentalism to climate denial, COVID-19 minimization, and resistance to public health and safety regulation. [1] If your ideological core is “government must not interfere with the market,” then any science that implies the need for major regulation (carbon constraints, pollution controls, safety standards) is a threat to your worldview. The easiest “fix” is to attack the science. That helps explain why non-economists who’ve internalized the myth often reject not only the economic case for regulation, but also the scientific evidence that markets alone won’t handle certain problems (climate, pandemics, environmental toxins).
Everything I've been arguing about supply-side economics lines up neatly with what these books document historically:
| Argument from Part I | Historical explanation in these books |
|---|---|
| Me: markets are not independent of institutions; regulation is an enabling condition for competitive markets. | Big Myth: shows how business interests spent a century teaching people the exact opposite—that markets are natural and pre-political, and the state is inherently disruptive. [1] |
| Me: unregulated markets tend toward monopoly, capture, and instability; regulation, antitrust, and predictability are requirements for markets to succeed. | Big Myth + One Nation Under God: show how corporate campaigns against the New Deal and regulation framed any such institutional scaffolding as creeping socialism, using economic, patriotic, and religious language. [1] |
| Me: supply-side doesn’t address real growth determinants (institutions, human capital, capabilities, endogenous innovation); its side effects actually damage them. | These books: show why the public conversation is nevertheless dominated by tax cuts and deregulation—because for decades, elites have invested in a story where: “Good policy” = low taxes and weak government, Anything else is “un-American,” “pagan statism,” or “socialism.” |
Together, these books explain the historical and cultural mechanisms that help make supply-side thinking so appealing and entrenched among non-economists. The Big Myth describes the construction of a secular faith in “the market” and suspicion of the state; One Nation Under God shows how that faith was fused with religion and national identity. The point is not simply that people are mistaken about Econ 101. They are responding to a decades-long, deliberate effort to make market fundamentalism feel like common sense, morality, and patriotism at the same time.
II. A Broader Scholarly Convergence
There’s a big ecosystem of people who’ve basically arrived at the same destination as Oreskes and Kruse, from different angles: business history, history of conservatism, religion and politics, political science, and “neoliberalism studies.” Below is a list of books that describe similar phenomena to Oreskes and Kruse.
Business, Religion, and the Conservative Movement
| Scholar | Work and contribution to the argument |
|---|---|
| Elizabeth Fones-Wolf | Selling Free Enterprise: Fones-Wolf documents how corporate America used PR, schools, radio, and workplace campaigns to sell “free enterprise” and weaken support for unions and the New Deal. [8] Business groups consciously tried to reorient workers’ loyalties away from unions and the state toward “individual initiative” and “free enterprise,” using propaganda embedded in classrooms, civic groups, and company communications. [8] This is basically an earlier, more granular version of the corporate campaigns Oreskes and Conway trace in The Big Myth. |
| Lawrence Glickman | Free Enterprise: An American History: Glickman writes an intellectual and cultural history of the phrase “free enterprise.” He shows how it evolved from a vague term into a central conservative slogan deployed against the New Deal and beyond. [9] His core point is that “Free enterprise” was deliberately redefined in the 1920s–1930s by business and conservative actors to mean low taxes, minimal regulation, and resistance to social democracy. That phrase then became a cornerstone of conservative rhetoric and popular “common sense,” shaping how Americans imagine the relationship between markets and government. [10] So where Oreskes and Conway talk about the “big myth” of the free market, Glickman shows how a single keyword (“free enterprise”) became a carrier for that myth across decades. |
| Kim Phillips-Fein | Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan: the book is built around the role of businessmen in building the postwar Right. [11] Her core focus is that influential executives and business organizations funded conservative intellectuals, built organizations and media, and methodically worked to roll back the New Deal and re-sell free-market ideology to the public. She converges almost exactly with Oreskes on NAM, corporate PR campaigns, and the way business translated economic doctrine into mass politics. |
| Bethany Moreton | To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise: Moreton shows how Wal-Mart’s rise was built on an ethic of Christian service, Sunbelt entrepreneurialism, and free-market values, and how that corporate culture helped mainstream “Christian free enterprise.” [12] The core point is that everyday workplace practices and religious narratives at Wal-Mart knit together: evangelical Christianity, gendered ideas of service, and pro-market politics, making Christian free enterprise feel like common sense for millions of workers and consumers. This is super close to Kruse’s story, but from the ground up instead of from DC and corporate boardrooms. |
| Darren Dochuk | From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism: Dochuk tracks how southern evangelicals moving to Southern California helped build a new evangelical-conservative coalition tied to oil, defense, and Sunbelt business interests. [13] Grassroots evangelical networks became deeply intertwined with pro-business, anti-government politics; religion provided the moral language through which free-market ideology spread. Together, Moreton, Dochuk, and Kruse give you a 3-D picture of how Christian nationalism + free-market ideology were mutually constructed. |
Neoliberalism and the Organization of Market Ideology
A second body of work comes from the “neoliberalism” literature. Although it is not always focused on U.S. public-relations campaigns specifically, it examines how free-market ideology was organized, institutionalized, and embedded in political and social life.
| Scholar | Work and contribution to the argument |
|---|---|
| David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism: Harvey famously frames neoliberalism as a political project to restore class power, not just a set of technocratic ideas. [14] His main point is that a small network of thinkers and policymakers took minority pro-market ideas and turned them into global common sense (Thatcher/Reagan etc.). Neoliberalism is about privatization, deregulation, and attacks on labor in service of re-concentrating wealth and power, often flirting with authoritarianism. This lines up with Oreskes’s “market fundamentalism” as a political project, not a neutral evolution of economic science. |
| Philip Mirowski | Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: Mirowski tracks how the “Neoliberal Thought Collective” (Mont Pelerin Society, think tanks, etc.) managed to survive and even strengthen after the 2008 crisis. [15] His main argument is that Neoliberalism is not just a set of policies; it’s a coherent worldview spread via dense networks of think tanks, foundations, and academic outposts (something I return to later). That worldview has sunk into “everyday life,” shaping how people think about markets, the state, and themselves (the entrepreneurial self, etc.). Mirowski’s “thought collective” is the conceptual cousin of Oreskes’s corporate-funded networks and Kruse’s corporate-religious alliances. |
| Wendy Brown | Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution: Brown treats neoliberalism as a political rationality that recodes citizens as bits of human capital and the polity as a firm. [16] Neoliberal reason “economizes” everything: law, education, family, even democracy. It erodes democratic subjectivity by making people see themselves only as market actors; this dovetails directly with your concerns about how supply-side frameworks ignore capabilities and institutional quality. Where Kruse and Oreskes explain how people came to see “government = problem, markets = freedom,” Brown explains what that does to democracy. |
| Quinn Slobodian | Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism: Slobodian follows neoliberals from post-Habsburg Europe to the WTO, showing how they explicitly sought to shield markets from democracy by redesigning international institutions. [17] Slobodian argues that Neoliberals didn’t hate the state; they wanted the state (and supranational law) redeployed to lock in market order and insulate it from popular demands. That means a lot of the “free market” talk is actually about constraining democratic politics—a perfect fit with Oreskes’s “market fundamentalism as guardian of freedom” myth. |
| Lisa McGirr | Suburban Warriors: McGrirr tells the story of grassroots right-wing activists in Orange County and how they helped build the New American Right. [18] Shows how free-market, anti-government, anti-communist ideas took root as everyday identity and community in postwar suburbs, not just as elite ideology. |
| Rick Perlstein | Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge: Perlstein chronicles the political rise of conservatism from Goldwater through Nixon and Reagan. [19] He shows how conservative elites turned fear, resentment, and cultural conflict into support for a pro-business, anti-government project; the storytelling side of what Oreskes and Kruse describe structurally. |
| Kim Phillips-Fein again | “Conservatism: A State of the Field”: In a big review essay on conservatism, she notes that recent scholarship emphasizes the fusion of free-market individualism with Christian community and cultural conservatism, much like Kruse and Moreton do. [20] So you have a pretty broad consensus in this field that the modern Right’s economic ideas are deeply bound up with corporate funding, religious narratives, and grassroots identity politics—not just with “what economics says.” |
| Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson | Winner-Take-All Politics: The authors argue that rising U.S. inequality is not some natural market outcome; it’s the result of organized political action, policy drift, and institutional changes that favored the rich. [21] They highlight the role of business lobbies and conservative networks in reshaping tax, financial, and labor policy to create a “winner-take-all” political economy. This dovetails with the point that supply-side policies are institutionally entrenched by rent-seeking and political feedback, not by their economic success. Related work (Suzanne Mettler, Theda Skocpol, etc.) talks about policy feedbacks—how policies like tax expenditures and privatized welfare create constituencies and expectations that then make the ideology harder to dislodge. |
Points of Convergence
Across these strands of scholarship, several core conclusions converge:
| Theme | Convergence across the literature |
|---|---|
| Free markets and free enterprise as a constructed myth | Fones-Wolf, Glickman, Phillips-Fein, and Oreskes all show that “free enterprise” and “the free market” were strategic rhetorical constructions, not natural descriptions of the economy. [8] |
| Corporate and elite networks as active ideological entrepreneurs | Business associations, foundations, and think tanks systematically funded scholarship, PR, curricula, and religious outreach to embed market fundamentalism in public discourse. [8] |
| Religious and moral framing as a force multiplier | Kruse, Moreton, Dochuk show how Christian language and institutions sacralized free-market ideology, making anti-regulation, anti-welfare politics feel like moral duty, not just policy preference. [22] |
| Neoliberalism as a political rationality that colonizes common sense | Harvey, Mirowski, Brown, Slobodian show how these ideas become a hegemonic worldview: markets as natural, the state as suspect, people as human capital, democracy as a potential “threat” to market order. [14] |
| Institutional feedbacks that keep supply-side ideas alive | Hacker and Pierson show how policies that favor the wealthy and business create the organizational and financial capacity to keep the ideology in circulation—even when the policies fail on their own stated terms. [21] |
Taken together, this broader scholarship suggests that the public’s attraction to supply-side and anti-regulation ideas is not a spontaneous misunderstanding of Econ 101, but the downstream effect of a long, deliberate, multi-front project—corporate, religious, intellectual, and political—to make market fundamentalism feel like common sense, morality, and patriotism all at once.
III. Think Tanks as Ideological Infrastructure
The historical literature explains how these ideas were constructed and embedded. The next question is how they are continually legitimized and reproduced in contemporary policy debate. That brings us to think tanks: what these institutions do in the political ecosystem, why they often look like sources of neutral expertise, and how some of them function as vehicles for ideological advocacy. I’ll begin with their origins and institutional form, then examine how they manufacture legitimacy, their strategic role in partisan politics, several illustrative institutions, and their effects on public policy and discourse.
What Think Tanks Are
To see how that process works, start with a basic question: what are “think tanks”? Sociologist Thomas Medvetz’s work is very helpful here. He argues that think tanks are “boundary organizations” that sit between four fields: academia, politics, media, and business. Their power comes from this interstitial position: they borrow legitimacy from each field without fully submitting to any of its rules. [23] So a think tank can look academic (PhDs, footnotes, “research reports”) without peer review or disciplinary standards, be politically plugged-in (advisers, Hill testimony) but still claim “nonpartisan” status, be media-friendly (rapid response, punchy quotes) without the usual journalistic fact-checking and take corporate/wealthy donor money while presenting itself as a neutral, public-spirited charity.
Andrew Rich calls them “nonprofit policy research organizations” whose number exploded from the 1970s onward, particularly in the U.S., as part of the idea that “expertise” should inform policy. But he also shows that they’ve become increasingly ideological and media-oriented, playing to donors and politics more than to careful scholarship. [24] Donald Abelson’s question, Do Think Tanks Matter?, starts from the observation that they’re now everywhere in policy debates, supplying talking pointsand ready-made “evidence” to politicians and journalists. [25] So at a basic level, they’re organizations that sell expert-looking arguments to politicians, media, and the public. That doesn’t mean all of them are junk—Brookings or the Urban Institute are very different from Heritage or ASI—but it means that appearance of expertise is central to the business model.
Historical Development
Their present role also makes more sense in historical perspective. Where did these “think tanks” come from? Rich, Abelson, and Diane Stone all emphasize that think tanks evolved through several “waves.” [24] In the early 20th century they began as “research institutes.” For example, Brookings, Carnegie Endowment, Hoover (originally) emerged in the Progressive era and interwar period. They were often technocratic and elite, trying to apply social science to public problems, less overtly partisan. Then a second wave of think tanks emerged focusing on Cold War and national-security concerns. RAND, CSIS, and similar institutions focused on strategy and defense; close to the state but still cloaked in expert language. From the 1970s onward, they became much more about ideological advocacy.
In reaction to the New Deal, Great Society, civil rights, and perceived liberal dominance in universities and media, business and conservative elites deliberately built a network of explicitly ideological think tanks (Heritage, Cato, AEI’s more overt turn, ASI, etc.). Their goal was to create a “counter-establishment” that would inject free-market, anti-regulation, supply-side and hawkish foreign-policy ideas into mainstream debate. Stone’s work on “policy transfer” shows how these organizations also export ideas—especially privatization and deregulation—across borders through networks and conferences. [26] The Adam Smith Institute in the UK can be seen as a British analogue to Heritage: its founders had worked inside the U.S. conservative think-tank world before returning home to replicate parts of that model. [27]
How Advocacy Think Tanks Manufacture Legitimacy
That boundary position helps explain the methods that advocacy think tanks use to manufacture legitimacy. Medvetz’s “boundary organization” point is key. To look like serious experts, think tanks hire the right people; for example, PhDs and former officials for credibility, plus communications staffers and political operatives to get the message out. They produce official-looking “studies”; They issue PDF reports with executive summaries, charts, and references, often reviewed internally but not through blind peer review. These “studies” contain citations, technical language, model-like diagrams—just enough to signal rigor to journalists and policymakers, who rarely have the time or expertise to audit the methods. Medvetz’s warning is that this hybrid identity is not accidental; it’s the key to their impact, but it also “limits their capacity to challenge the unspoken premises of policy debate,” especially those of funders and allied politicians. [28]
They often create a façade of policy-based evidence by starting with conclusions and working backward toward analysis. Andrew Rich and Abelson both note a pattern: for many advocacy-oriented think tanks, the ideological conclusion is fixed in advance (e.g., “cut taxes,” “privatize,” “weaken unions,” “hawkish foreign policy”), and the “research” is structured to support it. [24] Common tactics include:
- Selective literature review: cite the one or two studies that support your line; ignore the rest of the field.
- Heroic assumptions in models: use high elasticities, rosy growth multipliers, or conveniently small behavioral responses to make a policy look great.
- Framing and metrics: pick indicators that support your case (e.g., focusing on GDP or stock prices while ignoring inequality, institutional quality, or environmental damage).
- “Indexes” and “scores”: economic freedom indices, “Tax Freedom Day,” regulatory burden rankings, which look objective but are built on ideologically loaded criteria. Adam Smith Institute literally runs “Tax Freedom Day” campaigns in the UK. [29]
Once wrapped in a glossy report, these outputs are cited in speeches (“a Heritage study shows…”), used by lobbyists in briefings, and quoted by journalists under deadline as “experts say….” At that point, they function as evidence tokens in public debate, regardless of their actual rigor.
The conclusions are often shaped by their level of funding, the transparency of their funders, and the incentives built into their funding structures. The Adam Smith Institute is described as a neoliberal think tank and lobbying group, and has been rated among the least transparent UK think tanks on funding; it disclosed receiving tobacco industry money. [27] Many U.S. advocacy tanks (Heritage, Cato, etc.) draw heavily on corporate, wealthy individual, and foundation funding aligned with deregulatory and tax-cut agendas. Diane Stone’s work on “capturing the political imagination” emphasizes that think tanks sit in policy networks where funding shapes what’s researched, what’s not, and how results are framed. [30] The people presented as experts are not necessarily incompetent; often they’re perfectly competent economists or lawyers who’ve chosen to work in a setting where ideological alignment and donor satisfaction matter more than long-run scholarly reputation; speed and message discipline matter more than nuance; and outputs are not subjected to independent peer review. This dynamic can also affect economists who move from academic work into sustained political punditry, including figures such as Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.
Strategic Functions
Taken together, these features clarify the strategic functions think tanks perform within the broader supply-side and market-fundamentalist ecosystem: think tanks function as legitimation engines. They give partisan and corporate agendas a veneer of neutral expertise (“this isn’t ideology, it’s what the evidence shows”) by providing “studies” that politicians can wave around when cutting taxes for the wealthy, privatizing services, or weakening regulation. Think tanks also serve a crucial agenda-setting function, as illustrated by documents like Project 2025. They flood the zone with reports, op-eds, events, and talking heads so that certain ideas (tax cuts, deregulation, aggressive foreign policy) dominate the Overton window. Rich shows think tanks became key suppliers of “ready-to-use” policy blueprints for politicians and journalists. [24] This was especially apparent in the Reagan administration.
Think tanks also serve as a coordination mechanism across aligned interests. They connect corporate funders, politicians, media outlets, and sometimes religious or grassroots groups, aligning them around a shared narrative. Diane Stone’s work on transnational policy networks shows how they also move ideas globally (e.g., privatization recipes or security doctrines). [26] Think tanks also serve as personnel pipelines, creating a feedback mechanism that helps reproduce the system. For example, they provide a home for out-of-office politicians and staffers, and a recruitment pool for future administrations (the “revolving door”). Hoover, Heritage, and similar institutions have repeatedly staffed Republican administrations; ASI personnel advised UK governments; Henry Jackson Society alumni appear in foreign policy roles. [31] Lastly, they are crucial for narrative maintenance.
As we saw with Oreskes and Kruse, think tanks sit inside broader narrative ecosystems: they reinforce the myth that markets are natural and government is always suspect, casting any regulation as a deviation. So they’re not just neutral “idea factories”; they are political infrastructure for particular projects—neoliberal, conservative, neoconservative, etc.
Illustrative Institutions
The following institutions illustrate these functions in practice:
| Institution | Key facts and activities | Functional significance |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Smith Institute (UK) | Founded 1977 by Madsen Pirie and the Butler brothers after stints at U.S. conservative outfits like Heritage. [27] Self-described as a “practical think tank” making free-market ideas reality, not an academic institute. [29] Major roles: Intellectual force behind Thatcher-era privatisation and outsourcing; early papers on local government contracting, poll tax, transport deregulation, and cutting top income tax rates. [27] Ongoing advocacy of tax cuts, deregulation, and “neoliberal manifesto” reforms. [32] Funding is opaque; rated one of the least transparent UK think tanks; disclosed tobacco funding. [27] | Functionally: ASI is a classic supply-side and neoliberal advocacy tank. Its reports and op-eds are used to argue for privatization, internal markets in health and education, and lower taxes, presented as evidence-based policy. |
| Heritage Foundation (US) | Founded 1973, conservative think tank in DC; a template for ideological policy shops. [33] Achieved fame with Mandate for Leadership (1980), a 3-volume blueprint for a conservative administration; nearly two-thirds of its ~2,000 recommendations were reportedly adopted by Reagan, including tax cuts for the wealthy, increased defense spending, and union-busting. [34] Heritage continues to: produce “studies” arguing that Reagan-style tax cuts paid for themselves and launched long booms, despite mixed academic evidence; [35] act as policy arm and personnel pool for Republican administrations and transition efforts (e.g., its prominent role in “Project 2025” planning for a future Trump administration). [36] | Functionally: Heritage takes the supply-side package (tax cuts, deregulation, small government) and wraps it in an aura of expert consensus and patriotic duty, making it easy for politicians to cite. |
| Henry Jackson Society (UK) | Founded 2005, transatlantic foreign policy and national security think tank, self-labelled nonpartisan but widely described as right-wing, neoliberal, and neoconservative. [37] Focuses on: interventionist, “muscular liberal” foreign policy; hard-line counter-terrorism and anti-extremism. Criticisms: Spinwatch and others have documented its close ties to right-wing networks and opaque funding; [38] The Guardian reported it pulled funding from parliamentary groups rather than comply fully with transparency rules; Muslim organizations and former insiders have accused it of promoting Islamophobic narratives under the guise of security expertise. [37] | Functionally: HJS produces reports that are then used in media and parliamentary debates to justify hawkish foreign policy, expansive surveillance, and securitized approaches to Muslim communities, with the authority of a “serious” think tank. |
| Hoover Institution (US) | Founded 1919 at Stanford as the Hoover War Collection, later expanded into the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace—a research institution with a large archive. [31] Over time, it became a prominent conservative think tank promoting “personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government,” while maintaining formal ties to Stanford but with its own board and funding. [31] Notable fellows include Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, and prominent Republican policy figures; Hoover fellows have staffed many GOP administrations from Nixon through Trump. [31] | Functionally: Hoover leverages its academic location and famous scholars to give high-status cover to deregulatory, supply-side, and hawkish positions. Its work is a steady pipeline of “respectable” conservative ideas into Washington and media. |
The effect of think tanks on public policy and discourse should now be clearer. They normalize a very particular worldview: markets as natural and self-regulating, government as clumsy at best and tyrannical at worst; taxes and regulation as almost inherently suspect, interventionist, security-first foreign policy as the default. They crowd out more rigorous or heterodox voices by design. Medvetz points out that think tanks’ need for media visibility, donor money, and political access “limits their capacity to challenge the unspoken premises of policy debate.” [28] In practice, this means the same small set of ideas—supply-side tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, national security maximalism—get endlessly recycled as if they’re the only serious options. One of the most pernicious aspects of think tanks is that they make propaganda look like expertise.
Policy-based evidence in slick reports is taken at face value by time-poor journalists and overworked staffers. Once something appears in a “study,” it can be quoted and re-quoted until it acquires a kind of pseudo-fact status, even if it would never survive peer review. Think tanks structurally tilt the policy landscape toward their funders’ interests. As Hacker and Pierson argue for inequality more broadly, organized interests beat diffuse ones: business-funded think tanks have far more capacity to constantly shape debate than underfunded public-interest groups. [28] Lastly, they support the durability of supply-side ideas despite mixed empirical performance. Even when tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, or privatization produces mixed results, there is always a pipeline of “studies” ready to say otherwise. That helps explain the resilience of supply-side ideology in policy debates, in spite of the kinds of theoretical and empirical critiques we previously laid out.
IV. A Typology and Network Model of Think Tanks
The previous section could be read as implying that every think tank is “bad” and everything it produces is garbage. That would be far too strong a claim. This section therefore introduces a typology that distinguishes research-oriented, advocacy-oriented, and hybrid organizations. It also adds a network analysis of how institutions such as Heritage, the Adam Smith Institute, Hoover, and the Henry Jackson Society connect donors, politicians, media outlets, and policy outcomes in episodes including Reagan-era tax cuts, Thatcher-era privatizations, the Iraq War, and post-9/11 security legislation.
Scholars like Medvetz, Abelson, Rich, and Stone all caution that there’s no clean, universally agreed typology—think tanks live in the gray zones between academia, politics, media, and business. [39] But for our purposes, we can build a useful ideal-type typology along three axes:
Three Analytical Axes
Knowledge-production mode: High-rigor, methodologically transparent research vs. “policy-based evidence”: rapid-output, low-rigor “studies”
Political role: Analytic / exploratory (problem-mapping, open-ended analysis) vs. Advocacy / campaigning (pushing a preferred policy line)
Funding & independence: Diversified, transparent, not beholden to a single interest vs. Heavily donor-driven, opaque
Using those, you can define four main types:
Four Ideal Types
| Type | Model | Description and function |
|---|---|---|
| Type A | Research-oriented policy institutes | These aim to mimic academic norms; peer-reviewed or close-to-peer-reviewed working papers, methods appendices, and willingness to publish inconvenient findings. They try to keep partisan alignment arm’s-length, even if they lean ideologically. The funding is more diversified (governments, foundations, some corporate, maybe endowment), often with transparency norms. Some examples are institutions like earlier Brookings or the Urban Institute in the US; some OECD/World Bank research units, or some university-affiliated centers that engage in policy work. This type provides genuine analytic capacity and long-run, somewhat disinterested problem-mapping, but can still reflect biases (e.g., mainstream econ priors), but the primary constraint is professional reputation, not donor talking points. |
| Type B | Contract research / evaluation shops | These do commissioned studies for governments, international organizations, sometimes corporations. Their methods are often solid (econometrics, program evaluation, cost–benefit), but the agenda is set by whoever writes the RFP. “Research” is real, but questions and framing are externally determined. For example, RAND in its more consulting-like roles; many smaller policy consultancies. Their function is to provide technical evidence to support or critique specific policies, but don’t usually drive grand ideological narratives. |
| Type C | Ideological advocacy think tanks | This is where Heritage, Adam Smith Institute, Henry Jackson Society, etc. mostly sit. Their primary goal is to promote a coherent ideological line (free-market, nationalist, neoconservative, etc.). “Studies” are often post hoc justifications for pre-existing positions: cut taxes, privatize, deregulate, expand security powers, etc. They will have strong links to a particular party or ideological camp; staff often cycle through partisan roles (“revolving door”) and funding comes heavily from aligned wealthy individuals, corporations, and foundations; transparency often limited. [27] A few examples, mentioned earlier: Examples: Their function is to supply ready-made ideological blueprints (tax cuts, deregulation, hawkish foreign policy) dressed up as expert consensus, serve as personnel pools for partisan governments and provide “evidence tokens” (reports, indexes) that can be cited by politicians and media. |
| Type D | Cause-/movement-based advocacy research | These are advocacy-oriented like Type C, but often anchored in a cause (environment, labor, civil liberties) rather than a general pro-business or nationalist ideology. Funding may be more public-interest (membership, unions, environmental foundations) but can still be narrow. Examples include the Economic Policy Institute (labor-focused), some climate/health/rights-oriented research NGOs. These primarily function to provide counter-expertise to corporate/elite-funded tanks. They are still advocacy-first; not immune to cherry-picking; but often filling gaps where mainstream or corporate-funded analysis is systematically biased. |
Rigor, Advocacy, and Funding
The same typology can be represented as a simple matrix:
X-axis: Research rigor (low → high)
Y-axis: Advocacy intensity (low → high)
Quadrants:
| Research rigor | Advocacy intensity | Typical location |
|---|---|---|
| High rigor | low advocacy | Type A (research institutes) |
| High rigor | high advocacy | Best version of Type D |
| Low rigor | low advocacy | Some weak/obscure outfits |
| Low rigor | high advocacy | Type C (Heritage, ASI, HJS archetype) |
And then overlay a funding transparency/dependence dimension; many of the most advocacy-driven neoliberal organizations sit in the “low-rigor / high-advocacy / opaque, donor-tied” corner. Medvetz would insist (rightly) that real organizations slide around in this space, but the typology is still handy for analysis. [39]
Think Tanks as Network Nodes
The typology classifies organizations; a network lens explains how they exercise influence. Instead of treating think tanks as isolated entities, think of them as nodes in a network (think tanks as hubs and brokers) connecting: donors (corporations, billionaires, foundations), politicians, parties, legislative staff, bureaucrats and regulators, journalists and media outlets, academics and experts, advocacy groups, religious orgs, grassroots movements, and other think tanks (domestic + transnational). Diane Stone’s work on “think tanks, global lesson-drawing, and networking” and “capturing the political imagination” is basically about this ecology—how think tanks operate inside policy networks and knowledge regimes, and how they link domestic and transnational actors. [42] There are different types of ties. A simple way to structure the network is by what flows along the edges:
- Money: Donors → think tanks (core funding, earmarked projects) → allied NGOs, media platforms, astroturf campaigns
- People (personnel flows): Think-tank staff → government posts → back to think tanks (the revolving door); academics → visiting fellowships → media commentary; politicians and staff → “distinguished fellow” or board roles
- Ideas & scripts: Reports, briefs, model legislation, and talking points, including “success stories” from other countries (privatisation, welfare reforms) transmitted via conferences and networks (this is Stone’s “policy transfer”). [43]
- Legitimacy: They provide endorsements (“X think tank says…”), co-branding and joint reports with universities or international organizations, and media amplification through op-eds, TV appearances, citations in news stories
Network Roles
Think tanks actively curate and manage these ties: that’s their strategic function. They also have network roles; this refers to what think tanks do in the graph. From Medvetz, Stone, and Garsten’s work, you can identify a few key roles: [39]
- Broker / bridge: They connect elites who might not otherwise coordinate: donors, politicians, media, sometimes religious or grassroots actors. They also organize conferences, private briefings, and “working groups” where ideas and people are matched.
- Amplifier: They turn fringe or niche ideas into media-visible narratives. For example: “Tax Freedom Day,” “welfare dependency,” “Islamist extremism,” “regulatory overreach”—all packaged and repeated until they become common phrases.
- Gatekeeper: They decide which issues get framed as “serious” and which get ignored. A Heritage or Hoover report can anoint a perspective as respectable; absence of attention can marginalize alternatives.
- Translator: They translate complex academic work into politically usable soundbites (often distorting it). They also translate donor preferences into “policy analysis” (what Stone calls addressing “legitimacy deficits” of powerful actors). [44]
- Policy entrepreneur: They package detailed blueprints—e.g., Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership (Reagan) and Project 2025 (Trump 2.0)—so incoming governments can just “plug and play” the agenda. [40]
- Transnational node: They link similar groups across countries (US–UK–EU), enabling export of supply-side, security, and culture-war scripts (e.g., Heritage’s outreach to European far-right parties; ASI advising on privatisation abroad; HJS humming in transatlantic neocon circles). [45]
Four Institutions in Network Perspective
Applying this network framework makes it easier to understand why these organizations can be powerful even when the “research” itself is weak: they’re network position + branding, not just content. Without drawing the graph explicitly, we can describe each think tank’s network position and function, based on the aforementioned network characterization.
| Institution | Network position | Roles | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Smith Institute – UK neoliberal hub | It is a hub between UK Conservative politicians and policy staff, corporate and financial-sector donors (often opaque), right-leaning media (Telegraph, Spectator, etc.), transatlantic neoliberal network (Heritage, Cato, U.S. libertarians), privatization programs in the UK and abroad (World Bank / USAID-connected work). [27] | Broker: connected Thatcherite politicians, civil servants, and privatization-minded business leaders; also later UK and foreign policymakers. Amplifier: coined and pushed ideas like railway fragmentation, internal markets in public services, Tax Freedom Day. [27] Translator: packaged hard neoliberal doctrine into snappy, media-friendly pamphlets, making radical ideas sound like technocratic reform. | Intellectual partner for UK privatisation ideology; major influence on Thatcher-era policy and later waves of market reforms. [27] |
| Heritage Foundation – U.S. conservative / supply-side command center | Hub connecting: U.S. conservative donors (billionaires, corporate PACs, foundations), Republican politicians and administrations (Reagan, both Bushes, Trump), conservative media (Fox, talk radio, right-wing digital ecosystem), allied advocacy groups (religious right, gun lobby, anti-regulation orgs), an international far-right network (recent outreach in Europe). [46] | Policy entrepreneur: Mandate for Leadership & Project 2025 are archetypal “plug-and-play” blueprints for incoming administrations. [40] Personnel pipeline: steady supply of staffers for GOP administrations, and a landing pad for ex-officials. Amplifier: produces endless reports arguing that tax cuts, deregulation, and military buildup are empirically justified, then pushes those through media networks. | Helped reorient U.S. policy toward supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and militarised foreign policy from the 1980s onward. Now exporting a culture-war-infused, nationalist neoliberalism into Europe. [45] |
| Henry Jackson Society – security and neoconservative node | UK-based node linking: neoconservative U.S. and UK policy circles, security services and defence-minded politicians, donors with strong interest in a specific foreign-policy line (pro-intervention, hard line on Islamism, strong ties to Israel in some reporting), media outlets hungry for “terrorism experts.” [41] | Amplifier: publishes terrorism and extremism “studies” that are heavily cited by media and policymakers as security expertise, often with a clear ideological tilt (e.g., Islamophobic framings). [41] Broker: organizes events and briefings that bring together MPs, security officials, and like-minded commentators. Legitimizer: its “think tank” branding makes polemical claims sound like neutral risk analysis. | Helps sustain a securitized, Islam-focused narrative around terrorism and extremism, shaping public perceptions and policy debates (e.g., Prevent, charity regulation). [41] |
| Hoover Institution – academic–policy bridge on the right | Embedded in Stanford, with: a large endowment and archives, a roster of high-status scholars (Nobelists, prominent historians, ex-officials), close ties to Republican administrations and conservative donors. [31] | Translator: turns academic work (economics, national security, history) into policy-friendly narratives about free enterprise, deregulation, and U.S. power. Legitimizer: the Stanford connection + big-name fellows give a patina of academic seriousness to conservative policy lines. Personnel pipeline: many fellows serve in or advise Republican administrations. | Long-term normalization of free-market and small-government ideas as respectable, “serious” positions within elite U.S. discourse; acts as a bridge between academia and Republican policy shops. |
With this typology + network lens, we can very cleanly explain why supply-side economics, market fundamentalism, and anti-regulation paranoia stay entrenched even when they fail empirical and theoretical tests: there is a permanent infrastructure dedicated to making them sound reasonable, inevitable, and morally correct.
V. Hoover and the Problem of Epistemic Authority
Hoover offers a particularly sharp illustration of the divide between academic economics and ideologically oriented policy advocacy, even though the two literally occupy the same campus. Placing Hoover beside Stanford’s Economics Department lets us compare the institutional incentives, methods, and forms of accountability behind two bodies that can both appear to the public as sources of economic expertise. In economic-methods terms, it is almost a natural experiment—minus the intervention.
Institutional Missions and Incentives
Stanford Economics Department states its mission as training students “in the methods and ideas of modern economics” and “conduct[ing] both basic and applied research…that pushes forward the frontier of knowledge.” [47] Fields include causal inference, applied econometrics, market design, macro/finance, networks, etc.—very much in the RCT, quasi-experimental, structural, and data-intensive tradition. [48] Hoover Institution is officially a public policy think tank “which promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government,” with its own board and funding, formally within but institutionally separate from Stanford. [31] Hoover’s own description of its ideology: “Our scholars are oriented to promote individual freedom… There is skepticism of proposed government solutions… [We] rely on democratic capitalism as an avenue toward achieving peace and prosperity.” [49] So you’ve got one institution whose primary constraint is peer review, seminar culture, and professional reputation in the research community and another whose primary constraint is alignment with a broad “free enterprise / limited government” mission and policy relevance to donors, politicians, and media. That’s already enough to expect big divergence on macro, regulation, tax policy, etc.
Methods and Governance
There is also a substantial methodological gap between the two. On the economics-methods side, Stanford runs a Causal Science Center, multiple causal inference courses across economics, statistics, and GSB, and a lot of network/macro-finance work that’s fully plugged into the global empirical frontier. [50] That research lives or dies on identification strategies, robustness checks, and how it fares in general-interest journals and top field journals. Hoover does have serious economists and working papers, but as an institution it’s normatively pre-committed: “Return to first principles: limited government, markets, incentives, rule of law, and predictability” is literally a Hoover policy piece on “jumpstarting the economy.” [51] The mission statement explicitly centers free enterprise and limited government, not “discover the truth about how economies work, wherever it leads.” [31] So a Stanford macro person working on, say, fiscal multipliers or financial frictions is (in principle) open to the answer being “yes, sometimes large governments stabilize markets and raise welfare.” A Hoover policy macro piece, by design, will tend to interpret results through a “limited government, free markets” lens and push in that direction, even when the frontier literature is more ambiguous. You can see the epistemic difference in how each side treats, say, government’s role. Hoover pieces frequently start from a strong skepticism about regulation and intervention and argue outward from that. [49] Stanford Economics courses and papers start from models and data and then argue about where government helps or hurts based on identification, not mission. There are Hoover fellows who do serious empirical econ, but institutionally the incentives and vetting are very different from a top-five economics department.
There’s also a governance issue. Hoover has its own board of overseers and appointment processes; Hoover fellows are not hired, tenured, or reviewed by Stanford Economics (or other departments) in the usual way. [31] That’s precisely why you can have things like the Scott Atlas COVID episode: a Hoover fellow taking high-profile, very controversial positions in Washington, and Stanford faculty publicly disassociating themselves and calling for a re-examination of Hoover’s relationship to the university. [52] Campus criticism has been explicit about this; over 100 faculty signed a letter raising concerns that Hoover’s ideological bias, controversial scholarship, and lack of diversity in viewpoints were at odds with Stanford’s academic standards. [53].
So the difference between the two can be explained by different appointment filters (mission fit vs. disciplinary excellence), different accountability mechanisms (donors/board/media vs. journals/tenure/seminars), and different time horizons (rapid commentary and policy relevance vs. multi-year research programs). They share a campus and sometimes individuals, but they live in different knowledge regimes. This is not to say that academia is perfect but it is clearly operating on different constraints and goals.
Why the Distinction Matters
These institutional differences matter in practice. Stanford Economics macroeconomists and causal-inference researchers are embedded in a literature that, on balance, finds tax cuts don’t usually pay for themselves, institutions, human capital, innovation, and inequality matter for growth, and regulation often solves real market failures. Hoover’s institutional ideology (free enterprise, limited government) aligns much more naturally with supply-side tax cuts, deregulatory priors, and skepticism of regulation and redistribution. So, an econ department seminar on, say, the Romer & Romer tax work or IMF inequality–growth papers is about identification and robustness. A Hoover op-ed or pamphlet about tax cuts is about selling a policy direction consistent with its mission, often leaning heavily on selective evidence and theory that fits the free-market narrative. From the outside, both can look like “Stanford Economicsomists say X,” but the epistemic warranty behind them is very different.
The comparison also needs an important qualification: Hoover is not 100% Austrian-blog / cable-news-level. There are fellows who publish in top journals, and some pieces (including on “the place of government”) explicitly acknowledge that markets need supervision and that “successful deregulation rarely consists of total laissez-faire.” [54] Internally, there’s some ideological diversity; even conservative student writers have complained recently that Hoover has “gone woke,” which is a revealing data point about its contested identity. [55] But as an institution, Hoover’s purpose is to advance a particular free-market, limited-government worldview, while Stanford’s econ department’s purpose is to advance the frontier of economic science. They occupy the same physical space in Palo Alto, but intellectually and methodologically they really are two different worlds.
Locating Hoover on the Spectrum
The Hoover case therefore clarifies the different epistemic incentives facing two bodies that can both appear to the public as “economic experts.” But Hoover also operates on the continuum mentioned earlier, and is by far not the worst offender. Hoover is distinct from Heritage, but also very distinct from RAND. There is a spectrum here — but it also happens that a cluster of explicitly conservative think tanks (Heritage, some of AEI, etc.) systematically sit in the “low-rigor, high-advocacy” corner of that spectrum, especially on topics like tax, climate, regulation, and culture-war issues.
Brookings, RAND, AEI, and Heritage
Brookings and RAND are far from flawless, but structurally they’re closer to research institutes. Brookings explicitly frames itself as an independent, nonpartisan research organization, with formal policies on research independence and integrity — including disclosure of funding, freedom of scholars to reach their own conclusions, and internal review procedures. [56] RAND has codified “Standards for High-Quality and Objective Research,” built around rigor, legitimacy, transparency, relevance, engagement, and inclusion. RAND reports and monographs undergo formal internal and external peer review, and those standards were updated as recently as 2022. [57] That doesn’t make them apolitical, but it means methodological norms and review processes exert real pressure on what they publish. Scholars are rewarded (and punished) by something at least similar to academic reputation.
By contrast: AEI is openly a conservative think tank “aligned with conservatism,” founded by and historically funded through business elites. It advocates for “private enterprise, limited government, and democratic capitalism,” and is a member of the Atlas Network and State Policy Network of free-market think tanks. [58] Its climate work is a canonical example of mission-first “research”: AEI staff have been prominent in attacking climate science and international agreements; the institute received significant ExxonMobil funding, and its climate activities were cited by Naomi Oreskes as part of the broader corporate-backed effort to cast doubt on environmental science. [58] Heritage is even more unapologetically advocacy-driven: it exists to advance conservative policy; its flagship works (Mandate for Leadership in the Reagan era, Project 2025 now) are explicit partisan roadmaps.
There is no institution-wide equivalent of RAND/Brookings peer-review standards; the primary constraints are ideological alignment with donors and base, speed and media traction, and usefulness to allied politicians. That’s why you see Heritage papers that are essentially extended op-eds on “woke” education, ESG, DEI, etc., dressed in the language of “research” but with minimal or cherry-picked empirical grounding [59] and AEI pieces that, on some topics, are serious and data-heavy — and on others (climate, regulation, union issues), track very closely to donor and ideological priors, with selective use of evidence. [58]
The conservative advocacy cluster systematically publishes low-quality research on key issues. Conservative advocacy tanks are prone to faux research, especially around supply-side economics and culture-war issues. One reason is ideological pre-commitment. Institutions like Heritage, AEI (on many issues), Cato, etc. are explicitly normatively committed to smaller government, lower taxes and regulation, and a specific constellation of foreign-policy and social positions. That’s not “we have a prior, but data can move us”; it’s “this is our mission.” When that’s your starting point, “research” often becomes policy-based evidence. You don’t ask: “Do tax cuts for the rich increase growth?” You ask: “How can we show tax cuts are good (or at least harmless)?” The result is heavy reliance on high-assumption models, selective citation of favorable academic work, and ignoring or downplaying literatures on inequality, institutional quality, externalities, climate, etc.
Funding and audience matter. AEI’s history shows how donor preferences nudged it further right over decades; scholars like Charles Murray were explicitly funded and supported by conservative foundations (Bradley Foundation, etc.) when other institutions became wary. [58] Heritage’s current turmoil — trustee resignations and staff departures over its alignment with MAGA-nationalist politics and highly polarizing culture-war hires — underscores how much its identity is now bound up with a particular faction of the Right, not with analytic standards. [60] The “market” for their work is elected conservatives, right-leaning media, and corporate and billionaire donors who want arguments against regulation, taxes, unions, environmental rules, DEI, etc. That market rewards message discipline and emotional resonance, not robustness.
Because they circulate within a tight media/political ecosystem, claims that would face intense scrutiny in a neutral academic seminar can survive and thrive in conservative media so long as they are rhetorically effective. An AEI or Heritage “study” can be cited by Fox, by a member of Congress, then by other outlets as “research shows…” — a kind of feedback loop where external critique from academia or mainstream policy circles barely registers. This is what Mirowski and others mean when they say neoliberal or conservative think tanks operate as “thought collectives”: they maintain internal coherence and external messaging even when external evidence is unfavorable.
It’s worth distinguishing Heritage from AEI. Heritage – essentially a Type-C advocacy tank: high-intensity partisan advocacy, lots of culture-war content, and only sporadic serious empirical work. The recent Project 2025 blueprint and its “woke” / DEI work are pure ideological documents dressed up as policy analysis. [61] AEI – more of a hybrid. Historically it has housed serious scholars (including Nobel-winning economists; its Council of Academic Advisers included Coase, Friedman, Feldstein, etc.), and it has co-produced some genuinely rigorous work (e.g., shared projects with Brookings on regulatory studies and poverty). [58] But on climate, AEI’s record is clearly politicized, including being part of the corporate-funded network Naomi Oreskes identifies as casting doubt on climatescience. [58] On taxes/regulation, AEI often functions as a predictable pro-market voice, with modeling assumptions that line up with supply-side priors more than with the full range of modern empirical work. So AEI is not monolithically “faux research,” but as an institution it still clusters on the right and frequently prioritizes ideology over full engagement with the broader literature on the very topics you’ve been critiquing.
The conservative advocacy tank ecosystem regularly produces glossy “studies” claiming large growth effects, self-financing cuts, or dramatic harms from regulation, and downplays literatures on inequality, environmental damage, and long-run institutional effects. Because those “studies” are fast, easy to understand, and pushed aggressively into media and political discourse, they carry disproportionate weight relative to their methodological quality. That’s why you see supply-side claims surviving in policy debate long after they’ve been heavily qualified or undermined in serious research and climate obstruction, anti-regulation arguments, and culture-war framings (e.g., “woke capitalism,” “DEI bloat”) getting institutional cover inside agencies and legislatures based largely on think-tank output. [58]
The conservative advocacy think-tank cluster—Heritage, much of AEI, Cato, and similar institutions—occupies a structurally distinct niche. It is oriented primarily toward ideological advocacy rather than open-ended inquiry, and its research products often serve to legitimize preferred policies, especially supply-side tax cuts and deregulation, rather than to test those policies without prior commitment. Donor incentives, partisan media demand, and dense policy networks sustain this niche and help explain why supply-side and market-fundamentalist ideas can remain politically resilient even when the contemporary economics literature is much less supportive of their strongest claims.
VI. Think Tanks as “Apologetic Institutions”
The preceding sections suggest a broader structural analogy. Both kinds of institutions can function to protect and promote a pre-chosen belief system rather than ask “what’s true?” in an entirely open-ended way; structurally, they can look remarkably similar.
The Structural Analogy
In religious apologetics, broadly understood, the conclusion is fixed: “Christianity is true,” specific doctrines are correct, sacred texts are authoritative, and so on. The task is to defend that conclusion against objections (science, history, philosophy, ethics), by providing arguments that reassure believers or persuade seekers within a certain range. You’re not allowed to end up with “Maybe this isn’t true” as the conclusion. The space of acceptable outcomes is constrained in advance. Apologists are notorious for selective engagement with scholarship. They use bits of critical scholarship, philosophy, history, science, but cherry-picked and repackaged. Critical work that cuts too deep is either ignored, domesticated (“that scholar isn’t really a Christian,” “that’s liberal”), or turned into a foil. The target audience is lay believers, not experts.
Serious theologians / religious-studies scholars are not the main consumers. The main function is reassurance, identity maintenance, and equipping people with talking points. Apologetics also operates within a massive industrial ecosystem: speakers, conferences, ministries, YouTube channels, book series, college ministries. Money flows from believers/donors → organizations → content that sustains the belief system → back into donations. Even when apologetics is intellectually sophisticated, it still operates inside a “conclusion-first” constraint.
The same structure can be mapped onto Heritage / AEI / ASI / etc. in economics and policy. They start with fixed conclusions / heavily weighted priors: “Free markets work best”, “Big government / regulation / taxes are bad”, “American/British power is a force for good” (for the more hawkish ones). The institutional missions encode conservative principles—including free enterprise, limited government, and “traditional values”—and are intended to make neoliberal and free-market ideas into political reality. They are not “find out how economies work, full stop.” Their role is to defend and advance a doctrine. Evidence is used as material for defense, not for inquiry. Just like apologetics, “Studies” are designed to support the conclusion, model choices, elasticities, samples, and literatures are chosen to give you the “tax cuts are good / regulation is bad” result.
Inconvenient evidence (inequality–growth links, climate damages, empirical failures of supply-side experiments) is minimized or spun. Mainstream economics that emphasizes institutions, inequality, or climate is treated as partisan, “left-wing,” or “statist.” Critiques are engaged just enough to reassure the base: “we’ve debunked that.” The logic is: “Given that free markets and small government are right, how do we explain X?” not “Is free-market/small-government ideology actually correct, given X?” That’s classic apologetics structure.
Audience and Institutional Incentives
The audience is not critical scholars in the relevant fields. Most macro and public-finance researchers don’t look to Heritage for new identification strategies. Climate scientists don’t treat AEI’s climate work as cutting edge. The audience is politicians and staffers who already lean that way, sympathetic journalists and pundits, activists and donors, and laypeople who want “expert” confirmation of what they already believe. Just like the average Christian is much more likely to have read a popular apologetics book than a critical biblical studies monograph, the average layperson who “knows” something about tax policy or regulation is often quoting think-tank talking points, not the actual economics literature.
Both worlds develop an “industrial complex.” In apologetics, donors fund ministries and institutions, to produce books, videos, conferences, study guides. Those “equip” laypeople with canned responses to doubts. The system reinforces itself; success is measured in reach and loyalty, not critical engagement. Likewise, with low-quality think tanks, donors (corporations, billionaires, foundations) fund think tanks. They then produce reports, op-eds, media appearances, Hill briefings. Those equip politicians, pundits, and lay supporters with policy talking points. Success is measured in policy wins, media hits, donor satisfaction, not in how their analysis fares in the peer-reviewed literature.
This structure can substantially distort public understanding. Ask a random person about tax cuts, regulation, or inequality, and they may be as likely to quote a Heritage “study,” an AEI fellow on cable, or a meme derived from a think-tank talking point, as anything from, say, the Journal of Public Economics or the IMF working paper series. Because think tanks are loud, fast, and media-savvy, that second set of claims becomes folk economics. Analogously, most religious laypeople who consume apologetics have no idea there’s a century-plus of critical scholarship on authorship, textual transmission, ANE cosmology, comparative religion, etc., and think “hard questions” have been decisively answered by popular apologists. The actual religious studies / critical theology world debates textual issues, historical contexts, philosophical problems, comparative frameworks, and often reaches nuanced, non-final, or destabilizing conclusions. In this account, apologetics operates in part as a counterweight to critical scholarship. Apologetics simplifies questions into manageable “objections” with prepackaged replies. The structural outcome is the same: a parallel knowledge system that insulates believers from the seriousness of the underlying scholarly fields.
Why the Analogy Matters
The analogy is not merely rhetorical; it is analytically useful in several ways. It helps explain the resilience of bad ideas. If you see think tanks as secular apologetics, it makes sense that supply-side stories survive decades of weak empirical support, and climate denial or anti-regulation myths persist despite overwhelming evidence. Their function is not to test ideas, but to protect an ideological core. You stop expecting Heritage to act like a university and start treating it as an organ of persuasion. That shifts the conversation from “are their studies good?” to “how do these studies function in the belief system?” Importantly, this analogy exposes the two-tier structure of “knowledge.” Top econ departments, central banks, and research institutes may be converging on nuanced, mixed results about taxes, inequality, regulation.
Meanwhile, the public is fed easy, confident narratives from apologetics-style institutions that never update meaningfully. That’s the same two-tier gap between biblical studies and popular apologetics. If you treat AEI/Heritage output as apologetics, you know you have to go upstream: show people that there is a broader, more rigorous conversation they’ve never seen. You can also critique structure, not just content: “Notice how these ‘studies’ always land on the same side, no matter the topic?” or “Notice how they never publish conclusions that suggest more regulation or redistribution?” That’s analogous to pointing out to a religious audience: “Apologetics ministries never conclude ‘this doctrine might be wrong’; that’s a sign of the role they play.”
A General Definition of an “Apologetic Institution”
“Apologetic institutions” can be defined generically as: organizations whose primary function is to defend and promote a pre-committed belief system using the trappings of scholarship, with the following features:
- Mission statements encode fixed conclusions (doctrinal or ideological).
- Funding structures create one-way dependence on true believers or aligned donors.
- Outputs are asymmetric (huge volume of defense; zero genuine self-refutation).
- Audiences are lay, not expert; reassurance beats refutation.
- Epistemic norms differ radically from the adjacent academic fields.
Conclusion
Taken as a whole, the argument is cumulative. The historical literature explains how market fundamentalism was constructed and tied to freedom, religion, and national identity; the think-tank literature explains how those ideas are continually packaged, legitimized, circulated, and translated into policy; and the network and epistemic analysis explains why weak ideas can remain institutionally durable even when the underlying scholarly evidence moves elsewhere.
That is the larger explanation for the persistence of supply-side and anti-regulation ideology developed here: not a single mistaken proposition, but a durable cultural and institutional system that produces narratives, experts, policy blueprints, media amplification, and constituencies capable of reproducing the worldview over time.
The concept can therefore apply to secular as well as religious institutions. I’m willing to tentatively conclude that some think tanks function as apologetic institutions for neoliberal or conservative ideology, playing a structural role for their constituencies that resembles the role apologetics ministries play for religious believers. Laypeople’s “economics” can become think-tank catechism just as laypeople’s “theology” can become apologetics catechism—while the scholarly conversations in both domains remain much more complicated and often much less friendly to the simple narratives presented to the public.
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