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 ….

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.

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.