Neoliberal funders treated policy influence as a vertically integrated production pipeline

Evidence

When addressing their venture capital angels, the entrepreneurs of the Russian doll would admit that this interlocking set of institutions should be regarded as an integrated system for the production of political ideas. For instance, Richard Fink, one of the primary protagonists in building up George Mason University as a neoliberal outpost, by linking it directly to the Koch Foundation, of which he later became president, informed his prospective funders: … The translation of ideas into action requires the development of intellectual raw materials, their conversion into specific policy products, and the marketing and distribution of these products to citizen-consumers. Grant makers, Fink argued, would do well to invest in change along the entire production continuum, funding scholars and university programs where the intellectual framework for social transformation is developed, think tanks where scholarly ideas get translated into specific policy proposals, and implementation groups to bring these proposals into the political marketplace and eventually to consumers. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Fink’s ‘production continuum’ maps onto the pipeline metaphor in ‘Grafting and Growth’ where infrastructure channels growth — here, an intellectual infrastructure for cultivating policy. — connects to: Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1983; US democracy-endowment funds seeded Neoliberal advocacy in the developing world — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1949; The neoliberal thought collective is a multilevel, multiphase, multisector political capacity-building project — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 1325 (+6 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the manufacturing metaphor applied to ideas — intellectual ‘raw materials,’ ‘policy products,’ and ‘citizen-consumers’ as a factory model of political change.
• DEFINE: Defines the vertical integration structure of the neoliberal thought collective: scholarship → think tank → implementation.

Broader Connections

• The neoliberal thought collective is a multilevel, multiphase, multisector political capacity-building project #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 1325
• Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1983
• US democracy-endowment funds seeded Neoliberal advocacy in the developing world #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1949
• Volker Fund pushed neoliberal reformulation to serve corporate Cold War interests #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 762
• Neoliberals viewed foreign investment as inseparable from exporting capitalist social transformation #exemplifies (0.70) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 298