Check out David Gordon’s valuable article on the “Kochtopus,” that is, the network of libertarian think tanks funded by Charles Koch.
My own experience with the Kochtopus is complicated: in the past I’ve benefited enormously from my association with the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies, both intellectually and financially; they helped fund my education, they helped convert me to anarchism, and I spent three of my happiest summers in their graduate summer program (the first as a summer fellow, the other two as the director). Nor were they, in those days anyway, invariably hostile toward Rothbardianism; my copy of Power and Market (autographed by Rothbard) was a gift from IHS at my first IHS conference.
But thanks to my experience with IHS I can also testify to the truth of the somewhat anti-intellectual turn that Koch began pushing in the 1990s. I remember when Koch, evidently beginning to despair at the prospects of achieving political goals in his lifetime, became obsessed with a quick fix and decided that IHS needed to have “quantifiable results.” Massive micromanagement ensued (so much for “market-based management” – though as far as I can tell, MBM is just a way of simulating markets à la market socialism anyway). The word was to deemphasise abstract academics and emphasise policy studies instead.
These were the days that my friends and I used to refer to as “the Shadow falling on Rivendell.” First Walter Grinder – the heart and soul of the organisation as far as we were concerned – got axed. Then the management began to do things like increasing the size of student seminars, packing them in, and then giving the students a political questionnaire at the beginning of the week and another one at the end, to measure how much their political beliefs had shifted over the course of the week. (Woe betide any student who needs more than a week to mull new ideas prior to conversion!) They also started running scholarship application essays through a computer to measure how many times the “right names” (Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, Bastiat, etc.) were mentioned – regardless of what was said about them!
Many IHSers protested (I recall Randy Barnett and Emilio Pacheco offhand) but to no avail. (I was at a big meeting where Koch was presenting his new strategy, and Emilio got up, visibly upset, and asked Koch whether the major historical figures of classical liberalism would have received any support under the new Koch policy; I can’t remember what Koch replied, I think he just swanned off. I reckon Emilio is a lot happier at Liberty Fund, where the attitude toward academics and historical figures is rather more congenial.)
All that said, I see from their website that IHS is still offering conferences with readings from the likes of Locke, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Madison, Calhoun, Constant, Bastiat, Spencer, Sumner, de Jouvenel, Mises, Hayek, and Rand; and its lecturers include such hardcore libertarians as Aeon Skoble, John Hasnas, and David Beito. Plus I hear good things from my students about the IHS seminars I’ve sent them to. So it looks as though the triumph of the Shadow can’t have been anything like complete; but I don’t have the inside info I used to have and so don’t know the details.
To be fair to Koch, the desire for “quantifiable results” is reasonable and somewhat important for a philanthropist. After all, he doesn’t want to be throwing his money away for no reason at all, if it could get better use elsewhere. Of course, the perennial problem of non-profits is their lack of, well, profits or even sales revenue to measure performance. This alone is not good evidence for psychologizing Koch’s motives as “despair at the prospects of achieving political goals in his lifetime.” If Koch’s ultimate goal was achieving liberty within his lifetime (a prospect even less likely now than it was 18 years ago, when Kock was 18 years younger), he would be investing in low-probability but high-payoff libertarian-oriented business ventures ala Peter Thiel.
A deemphasis on abstract academics and an emphasis on policy studies also doesn’t follow from a “get liberty quick” motive; after all, no matter how many policy papers Cato puts out, the overall change in policy will most likely be negligible, at least from the perspective of achieving a radically freer society.
I’m not even sure a desire for “quantifiable results” explains this change in emphasis; after all, the production of abstract academics is quantifiable, just as much as the production of policy studies is. Perhaps the connection between producing abstract academic papers and making society freer is tenuous, but then again, so is the connection between producing Cato policy papers and making society freer. We are a long ways from getting Congress to adopt Cato’s Handbook For Congress, and it’s not clear we’ve gotten any closer as a result of its publication.
As for what I think of IHS, I think they are unnecessarily secretive, media-shy, and institutionally conservative, but other than that I have no complaints. Of course, IHS is unnecessarily secretive, media-shy, and institutionally conservative because Koch is secretive (for somewhat good reason), media-shy, and institutionally conservative.
To be fair to Koch, the desire for “quantifiable results” is reasonable and somewhat important for a philanthropist.
Sure, but the problem is, not every enterprise has quantifiable results. In particular, academic work to change the political culture (which is what Koch said IHS’s mission was) doesn’t have quantifiable results, and certainly not short-term ones. And it seems to me that Koch was making the mistake of switching from IHS’s actual mission to something different from and incompatible with it, merely because it had quantifiable results (what they call “teaching to the test”), while still apparently believing that what he had done was to find a way to make the original mission quantifiable rather than changing the subject.
This alone is not good evidence for psychologizing Koch’s motives as “despair at the prospects of achieving political goals in his lifetime.”
Admittedly it’s a somewhat tendentious redescription of what he said, but that is my interpretation of what he said; it’s not just an inference based on his actions.
A deemphasis on abstract academics and an emphasis on policy studies also doesn’t follow from a “get liberty quick” motive; after all, no matter how many policy papers Cato puts out, the overall change in policy will most likely be negligible, at least from the perspective of achieving a radically freer society.
I agree. But the question is whether Koch agrees — or anyway whether he agreed in the mid-90s when he made these decisions. From what he said at the time I don’t think he agreed.
I’m not even sure a desire for “quantifiable results” explains this change in emphasis
Well, I’m just going by what he said; those were his words, not mine. I was there at the meeting in Chicago when he said that IHS’s purpose was to change the political culture, that we needed to be more policy-oriented and goal-oriented and less focused on abstract ideas, that we needed to quantify IHS’s impact on the culture, and that since we couldn’t do it directly we needed to devise proxies for it. And then shortly afterward these new policies came down the pike.
after all, the production of abstract academics is quantifiable
Well, some aspects of it are quantifiable. But impact on producing long-term changes in the political culture is not easily quantifiable, especially on a short-term basis. Koch was trying to micromanage an academic institute with apparently no understanding of what academics do; he seems to have forgotten about Hayek and local knowledge. And his personnel changes caused serious disruptions in the academic network that IHS had worked so hard to sustain.
Of course Koch is entitled to do such things; it’s his money. But I think his decisions were self-defeating.
Ironically, Rothbard was once a big defender of the Kochtopus. See here where he wrote:
You, say, are a multi-millionaire, and you get converted to libertarianism. You’re all excited about it, and you want to do something to advance the cause. Things being what they are, the main thing you can contribute is your money. … you are the multi-millionaire, and you want to do the best you can for liberty with the money you give out. Wouldn’t you want to have control over how your own money is spent? Hell yes. You’d have to be an idiot not to, and also not care too much either about money or the libertarian cause.
Obviously he changed his mind later ….
All this has a left-libertarian moral about the dangers of nonstate power also ….