After the Great Recession, the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, needed to compete even harder for every dollar. Arthur C. Brooks and his colleagues set out to demonstrate its true impact to a generation of data-savvy philanthropists.
AEI’s output is pretty straightforward: books, research articles, op-eds, media appearances, and so on. Determining its impact meant measuring its competitive standing in the marketplace of ideas.
Brooks describes two of the metrics AEI uses: how many op-eds its scholars publish in prominent newspapers and how often those scholars are called by Congress to give testimony. Measured against its four leading competitors, AEI can claim 36% of op-eds over the period 2015–2017 and the most testimonies (by a wide margin) in the years 2009–2017.
In the summer of 2008 I was happily working as a professor at Syracuse University when I received an unexpected phone call. For the previous year the American Enterprise Institute—one of the oldest and best-known think tanks in the country, where I had a part-time affiliation—had been searching for a new president. Was I willing to be considered for the job?
