One organization founded a third of the world’s market-oriented think tanks since 1981

Evidence

To facilitate mass production in a transnational setting, neoliberals actually concocted a “mother of all think tanks” to seed their spawn across the globe. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher to assist other MPS-related groups in establishing neoliberal think tanks in their own geographic locations. It claims to have had a role in founding a third of all world “market oriented” think tanks, including (among others) the Fraser Institute (Canada), the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information (Venezuela), the Free Market Center (Belgrade), the Liberty Institute (Romania), and Unirule (Beijing). Atlas provided, among other services, one convenient conduit to launder contributions from such corporations as Philip Morris and Exxon to more specialized think tanks promoting their intellectual agenda. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 125

Categorization

• XREF: The franchising of think tanks across national markets parallels how the diamond bourse and law merchant extended extralegal governance across jurisdictions — networked institutions replicating a template. — connects to: A single foundation seeded a third of all market-oriented think tanks; Atlas Foundation exported the neoliberal think-tank model worldwide — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1943
• QUESTION: Worth verifying Atlas’s claim of founding a third of market think tanks — the ‘mother of all think tanks’ franchise model deserves a deeper causal account.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 125

Broader Connections

• A single foundation seeded a third of all market-oriented think tanks #corroborates (1.00)
• Atlas Foundation exported the neoliberal think-tank model worldwide #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1943