Saturday, March 27, 2010

On rhe DeFrumming of the AEI

I'm not as worked up as some people over the deFrumming of the American Enterprise Institute. I tend to think he's been right on a number of issues lately--particularly his point that the Repubs made a huge tactical error in letting the Dems pass health care without any GOP sanitizing--but I've never thought he was anywhere near as interesting an apostate as Bruce Bartlett, who got canned from another think thank a few years back for writing the best book so far about George W's economic policy.

But I do offer one insight which I guess applies to both: it's one reason why we want professors to have tenure.

Don't misunderstand me here: I know that tenure can lead to sluggishness, lack of accountability, bunions, flat feet, the whole works. And I don't mean to say AEI (or any other think tank, for tht matter) needs to have tenure: it is their ball and bat and they can make whatever rules they want.

But the whole point of not having tenure is that when the guy with the deep pockets doesn't like what you say, you get canned. Which is, I suppose, no fun for Frum (or Bartlett). But it is also, not incidentally, why think tanks will never be taken as seriously as universities. Say what you like about Paul Krugman, you know perfectly well he is not under the thumb of the big donors at Princeton, or he'd be bussing tables down at the Tiger Inn. No matter how good the work of the think tank (and some of it, even from AEI, can be very good) you know that at the end of the day, he minions are at the behest of the moneybags, and they aren't going to say anything that will get them fired. Or, if they do, they'll get fired.

No comments: