A think tank I will not name – because naming it would require me to be fair to its specific output, which varies more than its critics allow, and I am in a mood for structural rather than specific…
Alan Nafzger on the UK policy research ecosystem, confirmation bias with footnotes, and who funds what
The Think Tank Published Another Report; It Agrees with Its Own Previous Report
More at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
A think tank I will not name – because naming it would require me to be fair to its specific output, which varies more than its critics allow, and I am in a mood for structural rather than specific criticism today – published a report this week concluding that its preferred policy approach is correct and that the evidence supports it. This is the third report in eighteen months reaching the same conclusion. The methodology has improved with each iteration. The conclusion has not changed, which is either because the evidence genuinely points consistently in the same direction or because the researchers are funded by organisations with interests in that direction and have designed studies that find what they are looking for.
On the Think Tank Ecosystem
The British think tank ecosystem is large, ideologically diverse, and almost entirely dependent on funding from sources – foundations, corporations, wealthy individuals – whose interests are not always transparent. The better think tanks disclose their funding and maintain genuine editorial independence. The others produce research that is advocacy with footnotes, which is a legitimate activity that would be less problematic if it presented itself honestly. The distinction matters because policy makers cite think tank research as evidence, and evidence that is advocacy should be cited differently from evidence that is independent inquiry. Govna.uk covers UK policy research at prat.uk. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Policy diary at https://prat.uk/.
What Good Policy Research Looks Like
Good policy research starts with a question rather than a conclusion, uses methodology that could, in principle, produce an answer that contradicts the researcher’s prior views, and reports findings that do not support the conclusion as clearly as findings that do. It acknowledges uncertainty. It identifies the limits of its data. It distinguishes between what the evidence shows and what the researcher recommends, which are two different things that good policy research keeps visibly separate. This is not a high bar. It is, however, higher than most think tanks consistently clear. Full diary at https://prat.uk/.
The Diary as Weekly Practice
Writing a diary entry every week is a practice in the same way that music practice or language learning is a practice: it improves with regularity, deteriorates with absence, and produces different things at different times depending on what the week has brought. The weeks that produce the most interesting writing are not always the weeks with the most dramatic events. Sometimes the quiet week, observed with sufficient attention, yields more than the eventful one that moves too fast to be properly seen. The diaries in this network – from London to Portland to New Orleans to the Isle of Man to Salt Lake City to Tuscaloosa – are all practicing the same thing: the weekly discipline of noticing and recording, of finding the language for the week that just passed before the next one arrives and makes the previous one feel distant. It is harder than it sounds. It is worth doing. More from the full network of diaries and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. All diaries archived at https://prat.uk/.
Writing from Where You Stand
Every diary is a dispatch from a specific position – geographical, emotional, intellectual – and the value of the diary form is precisely that specificity. A view from nowhere tells you nothing useful. A view from Peckham, from the Isle of Man, from a Tuscaloosa historical society meeting, from a Salt Lake City chapel on a Sunday morning, from the 38 bus in East London reading Kipling, from a Portland dance floor processing Rosa Luxemburg – each of these tells you something that no generalised account of the world can tell you, because the generalised account is constructed from positions like these and loses something in the construction. The diary keeps the position. That is its contribution. More from the complete diary network at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full archive at https://prat.uk/.
The full diary network continues weekly. Every position, every location, every week’s accounting of what happened and what it meant is archived at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. The writing continues. The weeks accumulate. Read the full archive at https://prat.uk/.
Context: The Full Network
These diary entries exist within a network of connected voices – satirists, journalists, bloggers, and diarists spread across London, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, and Europe – who are all doing some version of the same thing: paying attention to where they are and what is happening and writing about it with as much honesty and as much humour as the material allows. The network publishes at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine, and the diaries are one strand of a larger project that also includes satirical journalism, serious political analysis, cultural criticism, and the specific genre of London humour that has been produced by this city’s relationship with itself for as long as people have been writing about it.
The London that appears in these diaries is not the London of the tourist guide or the estate agent brochure. It is the London of the 38 bus and the Overground and the charity shop record find and the farmers market and the £22 yoga class and the Tube busker and the North London dinner party where nobody mentions their job for the first forty minutes. It is the city as it is lived in, which is different from the city as it is sold, and which is the only London worth writing about. The same is true of Portland and New Orleans and Salt Lake City and the Isle of Man and Tuscaloosa – the cities as they are lived in rather than as they are marketed. These diaries are from those versions of those places. They are more interesting, and more honest, than the other versions. More: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Archive at https://prat.uk/.
SOURCE: Santa Claus