good evening young padawan,
i hope you have eaten your wheaties this morning as this is a longer post. but we have much to cover my budding jedi, and as we speak the battle between jedi and sith wages on in far flung corners of this galaxy we call the usa. in our last lesson, i taught you about the mystical powers of data and quantitative analytics, and what the policy jedi must consider before using them in battle. today we will discuss the policy wizard, a cousin of the policy jedi. we will also explore dark empires of policy research, places where some wizards use their powers to serve the dark side.
the wizards of the modern industrialized world include scientists, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and others, scattered throughout the life, physical, and social sciences. wizards are educated at wizard academies. the qi hammer himself was actually offered acceptance to practice wizardry at two eastern wizard academies with moderate levels of prestige. one academy is a member of the ACC athletic conference and the other a member of ECAC. the qi hammer turned down both offers because it was clear from both academies that the qi hammer would be treated only as a second class wizard, rather than a first class wizard with adequate financial support. because of this, but really more because the qi hammer had just met his future wife and emotionally intuited that a lifetime with her was far too awesome to put at risk with the study of economic wizardry and a long distance relationship, the qi hammer ultimately chose a different life path. looking back he is glad he did not take the wizard path as tempting as it was. the qi hammer is content with his current path, particularly when he thinks of a re-quote from the venerable theologian nick-from-new-jersey: "many paths, one summit"
here are pictures of the two academies of wizardry to which the qi hammer was invited to practice wizardry at his own expense....can you guess them?
after completing their arduous education path in doctoral programs, some wizards dedicate their life to advancing society's collective knowledge of their wizardry discipline. i like to call wizards with these ambitions 'true wizards'. dedicated mainly to the advancement of science, true wizards generally do not have much in the way of an ideological agenda, and thus do not bring much in the way of personal bias to their research methods and other aspects of their day-to-day wizardry. i guess you could argue that one bias these wizards might still bring to the table is the human-brain bias.
another group of wizards are the policy wizards. intelligent, ambitious and sometimes insecure, policy wizards are not content merely with the dissemination of their work for the benefit of science. these wizards would like to see their see their research eventually materialize in a specific policy, legislation, or initiative. the dream of such policy wizards is to one day occupy posts at a prestigious thinktower. thinktowers are places where several policy wizards work, spinning out massive quantities of research and analysis. at thinktowers, policy wizards are afforded near endless opportunities for theory development, for speaking engagements that include donor-financed crabcakes and fudge brownies, and for the daily opportunity to treat interns like third-class citizens. this behavior is particularly common among the more insecure of policy wizards.
but regardless of their interpersonal skills, policy wizards are very important, as they provide the policy jedi and policy sith with critical research and analysis to help advance their policy agendas. now at this point, you might be asking a question that the qi hammer considers to be a very very important question to ask. just as the policy jedi and policy sith have differing ideologies and visions for our country, do policy wizards have their own ideologies? the answer, young padawan, is yes and no.
some policy wizards do not have a strong political ideology, and simply want to be involved in the policy process by contributing to the research effort. but other policy wizards - the DARK wizards - harbor an ideological bias, sometimes a very strong one, and let this strong ideological bias guide their research.
for example, a dark wizard might hold the belief that all government programs fail. they may believe that all government programs across the universe and the time-space continuum have failed, have failed since the beginning of time, and will always fail until the end of time. as this is part of their ideology, these dark wizards build this ideological assumption into their experimental designs. read that last sentence two more times and pay attention as this is really important. dark wizards are people who regard themselves as scientists and academics - connotations that should connote a person with an un-biased approach to research - but who, rather than attempt to maintain a unbiased approach to research, set out from the beginning of the analysis or experiment, to show results that support their own pre-existing, personal, political ideology. and yet we call many of these people "researchers".
what a world.
to be clear and to be fair: dark wizards are found on both sides of the aisle in washington. but I would say that the right-leaning thinks tanks today (heritage, aei, cato) are filled with more dark wizards per capita than the left-leaning (epi) and non-partisan (brookings, urban) think tanks.
do you know what is even more pernicious than dark wizards? DARK EMPIRES. dark empires happen when a think tank strategically associates itself with a nearby university. well known corporate captains of industry, the Koch brothers, created one of the first and most potent dark empires during the 1980s and 1990s. the qi hammer is referring to the cato-george-mason-dark-empire (CGMDE). the cato institute, a government-has-and-will-always-suck leaning think tank, has a particularly high concentration of dark wizardry. go to their website and read about their research. pretty much all of their research begins with the hypothesis that government sucks, and ends with the conclusion that government sucks. after you read the research, look closely at where all these dark wizards come from. if you look, you will see that a large portion of these dark wizards come from the George Mason University Department of Economics, a nearby wizard academy. Over time, the Koch brothers donated millions of dollars to both George Mason University and to the Cato Insitute. basically this a way a for a couple powerful and conservative-biased dudes to run some big time chicanery on the American public: finance ideologically-driven academic work, then masquerade it as unbiased 'research' under the guise of a venerable academic institution, and then legitimize it in the form of a 'think tank'. and so to this very day, the dark wizards of the CGMDE continue to churn out perniciously distorted 'research', which then empowers the dark policy sith to keep waging their sophisticated campaign of fear-mongering, manipulation, obfuscation, and other big words like these....
so beware of the dark wizards young padawan. and may the force be with you....
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