The world's think tank dilemma
Yoichi Funabashi in Japan Times
In fact, traditional think tanks are confronting three major challenges that have put them in a uniquely difficult situation. Not only are they facing increased competition from for-profit think tanks such as the McKinsey Global Institute and the Eurasia Group; they also must negotiate rising geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China. And complicating matters further, many citizens, goaded by populist harangues, have become dismissive of “experts” and the fact-based analyses that think tanks produce (or at least should produce).
ROBERT STEELE: The author means well, but totally overlooks the fundamentals. The think tanks, largely without exception, are corrupt and stupid. Brookings is a classic example of a failed think tank — it does not do multi-lingual research; it does not access all eight “tribes” of information; its analysts have nothing to speak of in the way of either desk top analytic tools or back office data mining tools; it does “research” to attract funding, not to inform the public; and generally speaking, it does not do holistic analytics, avoids true cost economics, and has no clue what it means to consider the alternative of Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE). They are as impoverished morally and intellectually as the US secret intelligence community, the only difference is that they waste less money because they do not have it to waste.
See Especially:
2015 Robert Steele – Foreword to Stephen E. Arnold’s CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access
See Also:
The Future: Recent “Core” Work by Robert Steele UPDATED