New America is embroiled in a pay-for-play controversy of its own making. The New York Times reported that Slaughter had parted ways with Barry Lynn, an influential critic of the growing clout of U.S. tech companies. He ran Open Markets, an initiative “to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization,” and had been scathing in his assessments of Google, a firm that had donated more than $21 million to New America’s coffers. Slaughter has disputed some of the facts in the story and issued a statement asserting that Lynn’s “refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality” led to the rupture. Slaughter didn’t deny, however, that she had implored Lynn in emails, “We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” nor that she had warned Lynn to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”
My thoughts:
1. For a long time, I thought that the New America Foundation was excessively focused on the “net neutrality” issue. Google has promoted the same definition of “net neutrality.” So if it is corrupt for New America to be aligned with Google, then New America has been corrupt for a long time. The issue with Barry Lynn is almost beside the point.
2. It does strike me as unseemly when a particular business interest provides funding for a researcher and gets research that aligns with its interests. I am bothered by the Stiglitz-Orszag work for Fannie Mae. You may recall that I accused the Brookings Institution and something called the Bipartisan Policy Center of doing the bidding of big banks.
3. It seems to me that the infamous Kochs tend to fund on the basis of ideology, which I regard as less unseemly than funding on the basis of corporate interest. Perhaps I am naive about that. Ironically, I think that their libertarian ideology, if it were to gain sway, would reduce the power of special interests by taking government out of the arenas in which special interests exert so much power.
4. I think that there are much worse forms of political heavy-handedness than funding research. The housing lobby and the teachers’ unions come to mind.
5. I do not think that there is an effective way to stop businesses from funding research that is in their interest. Economists write what they honestly believe (that includes Stiglitz, the Brookings researchers, and the New America folks). It is natural for corporations to find that research supporting their interests is credible and deserves support. Do not attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by confirmation bias.
6. Should you always trust government-funded research more than private-funded research? Suppose that the topic is the Fed’s conduct during the financial crisis. Suppose that the research is funded by the Fed.
7. It is often the case that there is research that supports either side of an issue. The problem is not so much that special interests are able to fund “their” side. The problem is when the other side cannot get funding at all, or cannot get its results disseminated and discussed. That would be a harder problem to spot. It is one thing to identify a source of funding. It is another thing to identify a source of non-funding.
Special interests want government to intervene on their behalf, but also want government to abstain when it would be against them. It isn’t a simple one sided case.
One point of clarification: the Open Markets group formerly of New America has no economists. They are mostly journalists, with one law student and one law professor.
Is there some reason an Econ PhD from Yale doesn’t count? Marcellus Andrews is on the NAF Open Markets Our People page.
I’ve never seen anything New America-related published by Andrews. He’s full time faculty at Bucknell – I wonder how much time he’s spent at New America.
Anyway, this is how Barry Lynn himself describes the Open Markets group: “Traditional think tanks are based around the idea that you bring in experts, and you try to teach them how to write, or you try to teach them how to sort of tell their stories to journalists. What the people at New America said—people like Ted Halstead, Michael Lind, Steve Clemons, and Sherle Schwenninger—is “You know, what if we’re gonna reverse this and bring in the people who know how to write, the best and brightest young journalists, reporters, thinkers, and teach them how to do policy, how to see themselves as people promoting policy solutions to real world problems.” It made the place very vibrant. We immediately got all this traction. People paid attention to us.
None of these people had come out of economics academies. They really didn’t come out of hardcore legal training. These were journalists, free thinkers, people using their common sense, so the kind of constraints and restraints that you would find in other think tanks didn’t exist in New America. There were really no traditional intellectual restraints or traditional financial restraints. I was there for 15 years and had nobody really in my business for almost every day of that time.”
https://promarket.org/slow-creeping-consolidation-power-big-money-think-tanks-united-states/
Haven’t Stiglitz and Orszag been vindicated? The GSEs have been quite profitable for the treasury. Seems as though they were too pessimistic, if anything.
When it comes to company and think tanks/special interests, I assume once you are successful at a company that starts becoming your ideology. So Koch Brothers or Google have certain political thoughts initially but as they run the company their ideology starts fitting “What is Good for our Business, is good for the country.” Google believes in Net Neutrality but over the last 15 years, they have a strong ideology to Net Neutrality.
Take for instance the NRA….It is no longer believe in the 2nd amendment and its freedoms. They are a gun sales team and they pursue guns everywhere. (I am libertarian on guns but I don’t think guns are good for society. Less guns less killing.) So now the NRA in Red States are pursuing laws in which stops bars and churches having ‘No Gun’ policies for customers. That is not 2nd amendment.
The biggest flaw of Barry Lynn’s pieces is that he fails to establish that Google is a monopoly in a meaningful sense. He is riding on the EU’s decision, which looks more like an attempt to steal money from US companies than any attempt at modifying the behavior of a monopoly. By the logic they use, Starbucks could be sued for failing to put competitors’ drinks at the top of the drink menu in their restaurants. Just because something is big doesn’t mean it is a monopoly.