Wonk Friendly

If all exposure is good for business, then the think tank industry is booming. Our fellows—for I head one—appear on op-ed pages, in news stories and in the airwaves regularly, nourishing the 24-hour globalized news cycle and in turn being nourished by it. While media visibility is the most evident face of think tanks in the public imagination, there is a lot more to them.

The C. D. Howe Institute’s work on the distributional impacts of income splitting was at the core of an unusually public rift within cabinet in 2014. The Centre for International Governance Innovation, the think tank I run, is credited with having seeded and developed the concept of moving from the traditional G7 leaders’ grouping to the more inclusive G20. Through their work and skilful amplification channels in the 1970s, a family of conservative think tanks based in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada are said to have created the broad climate that persists to this day, in...