Thatcher’s government displaced academic economists by sourcing policy advice from private think tanks

Evidence

Perceiving the academic establishment to be arrayed on a spectrum from left-liberal to socialist, the Conservative government now turned for advice to individuals associated with the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. Think tanks and external advisers became a fixture in public administration, cutting out academic economists and diminishing their authority. … Neoliberal “economism” increasingly dominated the public domain, a discourse of markets and liberty whose lack of intellectual credibility was no obstacle to its propagation and execution. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s network-formation interest: think tanks like the IEA and Adam Smith Institute were nodes of the neoliberal intellectual network. — connects to: Think tanks arose to replace critical scholars with imperial-friendly policy theory; Think tanks slowly displaced Keynesianism with free-market doctrine in Britain — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1108; Neoliberalism triumphed through fringe think tanks, not academic economics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 377

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism triumphed through fringe think tanks, not academic economics #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 377
• Think tanks slowly displaced Keynesianism with free-market doctrine in Britain #corroborates (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1108
• Think tanks arose to replace critical scholars with imperial-friendly policy theory #corroborates (0.75)