Miscellaneous admin Miscellaneous admin

How to Tie a Bow Tie - An Alternative Method

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfuGYt5iPjQ  

Noted bow tie wearer and President of the Adam Smith Institute Dr. Madsen Pirie is often asked how he manages to tie such neat bow ties.  He made this video to demonstrate his alternative knot.

The second edition of Madsen's book on logic, How to Win Every Argument, is available to pre-order here

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Miscellaneous Sophie Sandor Miscellaneous Sophie Sandor

A new ASI project: book reviews

Libraries-Reading-Wallpapers-books-to-read-28317155-2560-1600.jpg

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good, books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The Adam Smith Institute is on the look out for young liberal thinkers to review political, philosophical and economic books! If you are a student and would like to review an important new book-length contribution to the humanities, get in touch.

After we've sent you the book, express your critique in 1000 words and submit it to sophie@old.adamsmith.org to be a part of a new ASI reviews publication we are launching.

We welcome reviews on recent works tackling everything from private schools for the poor to the causes of social mobility, to be edited and compiled together by the ASI research team.

Here are some books we think would be good choices—we are very open to any other suggestions:

 

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Miscellaneous Sam Bowman Miscellaneous Sam Bowman

UPenn Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings 2014 – how we did

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This year's Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings, which are compiled annually by the University of Pennsylvania, have been released, and the ASI did pretty well. Our global rankings were:

  • 69th in Top Think Tanks Worldwide (Non-US)
  • 16th in think tanks in Western Europe
  • 3rd in Top Domestic Economic Policy Think Tanks
  • 5th in Top International Economic Policy Think Tanks
  • 17th in the Best Use of Social Networks
  • 40th in Think Tanks with the Best External Relations
  • 24th in Think Tanks with the Most Significant Impact on Public Policy
  • 12th in Think Tanks with Outstanding Policy Orientated Public Programmes

The full rankings are here, and congratulations to our friends at other think tanks who also did well, particularly the Cato Institute which came 8th in the total US think tank rankings. We rose in most rankings, and by our own internal measures of impact, media coverage, research quality, events attendance and fundraising, 2014/15 is shaping up to be a very good year indeed.

Reading the report reminded me of the challenge that think tanks (and non-profits in general) all have. As Jeffrey Friedman has observed, when you run a for-profit firm, you have a single measure of success – profit. If you do X and profits go up, keep doing X. If you do X and profits go down, stop doing X. In a complex world having just one thing that matters cuts through quite a lot of confusion.

But, obviously, non-profits don't have that measure or any single thing we can focus on. For us, it's a constant struggle. Focus on fundraising too much as a think tank and you end up being good at talking to donors but not good at using their money to make the world better. The tail wags the dog. Focus on media coverage and you become a rent-a-quote. And so on.

The thing you really care about is changing the world. But if that's done by, say, changing the minds of young people, it takes decades to measure success. If it's done by focusing on policies implemented, you're tempted to go for the easy, insignificant win over the difficult long-term change. There's no single thing you can look at, so it's tough to cut through the complexity. Rankings like this don't do that entirely, but every little helps.

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