Reading the earlier Corner item on the Times hit piece on conservative think tanks, and the responses pointing out how destructive it is to boil political discourse down to tracking donor cash flows, a reader provided this funny personal story:
Sowell and McWhorter’s counter punch at the NYT reminds me of a conversation I had at a dinner party a few years ago. The hostess, knowing that I’m an economist, seated me next to an economist from the Brookings Institution. I work on Wall Street, which means my research is confined to pretty narrow avenues. I said it must be wonderful to work in a think tank, where you can take the time to dig into the really big things. “It’s wonderful sometimes,” she said, “but right now I’m writing a study on school vouchers, and I’m having a hell of a time finding a single study that isn’t positive. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
It was a very long dinner.