The November 11, 2013, Lab seminar was presented by Marie Newhouse, an Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow whose work focuses on think tank ethics and governance issues. Titled, "Think Tank Ethics and Excellence: A Framework for Analysis," Newhouse's presentation provided a comprehensive overview of her research concerning think tank practices and contemplated the significance of interpersonal and intrapersonal integrity in think tank scholarship. The primary goal of Newhouse's project is to provide a structure for inquiry into ethical issues that arise in think tank environments. In doing so, she hopes that this structure will enable scholars who work in think tanks to critically evaluate their practices and increase integrity, both individually and organizationally. To that end, Newhouse's presentation was structured into two parts: part 1 of the presentation focused on "Wonkish" integrity, or the personal integrity of think tank scholars, and part 2 of the presentation focused on the organizational integrity of think tanks as a whole.
Newhouse began her presentation with a brief overview of her project explaining that it is composed of three empirical undertakings: a series of journalistic interviews focusing on organizational goals and ethical commitments of managers, a pilot database of policy research products focusing on research methodology, and a semi-structured interview series of elite think tank policy experts focusing on research practices, ethical commitments of scholars, and impressions of the role of think tanks in the policy discourse. Newhouse stressed from the outset that when discussing the conception and significance of integrity to think tank scholarship, that it would be detrimental to conceive that think tanks have fallen away from some sort of original idealness or perfection. She argued that this is not a helpful approach when studying think tank ethics, as it is a burgeoning field, which is still coming into existence.
Delving into her conception of "Wonkish" integrity, Newhouse contended that one of the most troubling aspects of Wonkish discourse is that it is too often framed as an empirical discussion despite there being an unavoidable and inherent dogmatic quality to this type of interaction. Reasoning that policy discourse is necessarily a blended empirical and normative discourse, and that there are many levels of generalities at which contributions to the public policy discourse operate, she argued that when we do not attend carefully to the disparate feature of the claims being made, that these claims become rhetorical rather than helpful to real progress in policy. Newhouse explained that this could be especially problematic in a field such as macroeconomics, where randomized control trials cannot be run in a macro economy.
At this point in the presentation, conversation turned to the adversarial nature of this type of dialogue. One participant of the Lab was eager to know if the adversarial nature of the dialogue contributes to extremism and the building of politically polarized coalitions. Newhouse agreed with this assertion, though she resisted defining it as extremism, but instead should be considered dogmatism. In the end, there was shared consensus that when empirical beliefs become part of political identities, these static empirical beliefs are harmful to inquiry. Participants went on to discuss differing conceptions of ideology at length and considered how ideologies come to affect policy outcomes. After further discussion, Newhouse advanced her working hypothesis, which states that claims about what public policies are desirable cannot in practice be conclusively shown to be true or false. Nonetheless, Newhouse believes that these not fully justified judgments about what public policies are desirable can be better or worse, depending on whether wonks engage in a more or less deliberate, reflective, competent inquiry.
-Summary composed by Joseph Hollow