I was once told that the Brookings Institution’s annual budget for its foreign-policy studies programme is three times the size of the budget of the National Security Council. But even venerable and well-funded think-tanks like Brookings are going to be squeezed by the credit-crunch. And some of the tiddler think-tanks are actually going to go out of business.
Part of my job involves mixing with people who run or staff think-tanks. And like a lot of the other people I mix with – journalists, bankers, middle-class layabouts – they are a worried group.
The think-tanks with large endowments like Brookings, the Rand corporation and the Council on Foreign Relations have seen a lot of their cash-pile go up in smoke in the stock-market slump. Things are even more precarious for a lot of the smaller think-tanks – many of them in Europe – that do not have big endowments, but rely heavily on corporate donations and sponsorship. As company bosses and investment banks look for easy items of expenditure to take the axe to, donations to think-tanks for research are an obvious target.
The world of public-policy research will soon be feeling the effects.
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