Abstract
The conclusion of this book has two aims. First, it seeks to examine and compare how the public interventions of these four think tanks occurred in practice, whether they convey any type of intellectual or institutional change, and what these changes could reveal of their broader environment. Second, this chapter proposes understanding the intellectual changes think tanks underwent—as well as their import in politics and policy—through their function as ‘moderators’ of rapidly shifting fields. This privileged location allows some of these think tanks to ‘select’ ideas that might be marginal in one relatively dominated domain (e.g., a minority position in academic economics) and advocate for it successfully in another (e.g., economic policymaking).
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Notes
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“Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interactive behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect consequences […] that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself. […] There are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically organized public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel”. (Dewey 1946 [1927]: 126)
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González Hernando, M. (2019). Conclusions: Intervening on Shifting Sands. In: British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20370-2_7
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