eli5: what does a ‘think tank’ do?

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How and why and what is a think tank…

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You can think of a “Think Tank” as being an organization whose sole purpose is to create official-sounding paperwork, “studies”, and articles that support a given narrative, goal, or bias. Think Tanks exist on the left, right, and everywhere in between. If there’s a lobby for a cause, there’s a think tank supporting it somewhere. There are think tanks for veganism, environmentalism, conservatism, Christianity, Islam, Atheism, etc etc. Even supposedly “non-partisan” think tanks are effectively partisan because they’re comprised of fallible humans with biases.

Many of them also function as bribery machines because they can employ, at great cost, former politicians and officials for beneficial policy-making. What often happens is, while in office, a think tank makes an employment offer to a politician contingent on policy-making beneficial to the think tank’s MO. That might be increased war-hawkishness to increase MIC profits or it could be campaigning on healthy meals for kids to increase profits to agro companies invested in “healthy but expensive crops”.

Information from think tanks should be taken with a grain of salt because invariably whatever information they’re peddling they’re doing so because of perverse incentives.

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