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American Enterprise Institute
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The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. According to the institute its mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate".
AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.
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Encyclopedia
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. According to the institute its mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate".
AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. It is located in Washington, D.C.
AEI emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy.
More than twenty AEI alumni and visiting scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions.
Among the prominent former government officials now affiliated with AEI are former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now an AEI senior fellow; former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, now an AEI visiting scholar; former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, now an AEI senior fellow; and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (and wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney, a longtime AEI senior fellow.
Political stance
AEI is often cited as a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution.
The two entites have sometimes collaborated: in 1998 they established the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies,
and in 2006 they launched the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.
AEI is the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism, in both the domestic and international policy arenas.
Irving Kristol, widely considered a father of neoconservatism, is a senior fellow at AEI.
Officers and trustees
AEI's officers are Arthur C. Brooks, president; David Gerson, executive vice president; Jason Bertsch, vice president for marketing; Henry Olsen, vice president and director of the National Research Initiative; and Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies.
Its board is chaired by Kevin Rollins. Current notable trustees include:
- Gordon Binder, former chairman and CEO of Amgen
- John V. Faraci, chairman and CEO of International Paper
- Harlan Crow, chairman and CEO of Crow Holdings, the Trammell Crow family's investment company
- Christopher Galvin, former CEO and chairman of Motorola
- Raymond Gilmartin, retired chairman and CEO of Merck & Co.
- William S. Stavropoulos, former chairman CEO of the Dow Chemical Company
- Harvey Golub, retired chairman and CEO of the American Express Company
- Roger Hertog, former president of Sanford C. Bernstein and Company and vice chairman of AllianceBernstein
- Bruce Kovner, chairman of Caxton Associates
- Robert Pritzker, president of the Pritzker Foundation and Marmon Holdings
- Edward B. Rust Jr., chairman and CEO of the State Farm Insurance Companies
- James Q. Wilson, university professor and author
AEI has a Council of Academic Advisers, chaired by James Q. Wilson, which includes Martin Feldstein, Gertrude Himmelfarb, R. Glenn Hubbard, William M. Landes, Sam Peltzman, George L. Priest, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Murray L. Weidenbaum, and Richard J. Zeckhauser.
Scholars and fellows
AEI lists its current scholars and fellows on its web site.
A list of notable people affiliated with AEI, both past and present is available at List of American Enterprise Institute scholars and fellows.
Economics
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Thomas Donnelly, resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, and Gary Schmitt, director of strategic studies at AEI, criticized what they characterized as insufficient funding for United States defense programs and military in the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. According to Donnelly and Schmitt:
Compared with infrastructure programs that require lengthy planning, design and approval processes, extending efficient, already running defense procurements would have brief, as the military says, "flash-to-bang" times. And a dollar invested in such programs would not only circulate rapidly but would also have a multiplying effect, sustaining jobs not only among prime contractors but also among their suppliers. … Substituting accounting discipline for military judgment is not just questionable strategy but incongruous when the Obama administration is furiously trying to stimulate the economy. Moreover, in ignoring defense needs, the president will be passing on an obvious route to bipartisanship — pressing social-engineering liberals and green-eyeshade conservatives alike to focus on principled stimulus spending.
Global warming
AEI staff and fellows have been critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity.
In February 2007, a number of sources, including the British newspaper The Guardian, reported that the AEI had sent letters to scientists offering US$10,000 plus travel expenses and additional payments, asking them to critique the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
The letters alleged that the IPCC was "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent, and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and asked for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".
According to the Guardian article, the AEI received $1.6 million in funding from ExxonMobil. The article further notes that former ExxonMobil CEO Lee R. Raymond is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees. This story was repeated by Newsweek, which drew criticism from columnist Robert J. Samuelson because "this accusation was long ago discredited, and Newsweek shouldn't have lent it respectability. (The company says it knew nothing of the global-warming grant, which involved issues of climate modeling. And its 2006 contribution to the think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was small: $240,000 out of a $28 million budget.)"
The Guardian article was disputed both by AEI
and in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.
The rebuttals claimed factual errors and distortions, noting the ExxonMobil funding was spread out over a ten-year period and totaled less than 1% of AEI's budget. The Wall Street Journal editorial stated: "AEI doesn't lobby, didn't offer money to scientists to question global warming, and the money it did pay for climate research didn't come from Exxon."
AEI denies that the organization is skeptical about global warming. Criticizing the story as part of a "climate inquisition" published in "the left-wing press", the AEI's Steven Hayward and Kenneth Green wrote in the The Weekly Standard:
[I]t has never been true that we ignore mainstream science; and anyone who reads AEI publications closely can see that we are not "skeptics" about warming. It is possible to accept the general consensus about the existence of global warming while having valid questions about the extent of warming, the consequences of warming, and the appropriate responses. In particular, one can remain a policy skeptic, which is where we are today, along with nearly all economists.
Hayward has described efforts to reduce global warming as being "based on exaggerations and conjecture rather than science".
He also has stated that "even though the leading scientific journals are thoroughly imbued with environmental correctness and reject out of hand many articles that don't conform to the party line, a study that confounds the conventional wisdom is published almost every week".
Green has referred to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as "the positively silly idea of establishing global-weather control by actively managing the atmosphere's greenhouse-gas emissions", and endorsed Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear for having "educated millions of readers about climate science".
Christopher DeMuth, former AEI president, accepts that the earth has warmed in recent decades, but states that "it's not clear why this happened" and charges that the IPCC "has tended to ignore many distinguished physicists and meteorologists whose work casts doubt on the influence of greenhouse gases on global temperature trends".
AEI fellow James Glassman also disputes the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change, having written numerous articles criticizing the Kyoto accords and climate science more generally for Tech Central Station.
He has supported the views of U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe, an outspoken skeptic of human-caused climate change,
and, like Green, cites Crichton's State of Fear, which "casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it".
Joel Schwartz, an AEI visiting fellow, states: "The Earth has indeed warmed during the last few decades and may warm further in the future. But the pattern of climate change is not consistent with the greenhouse effect being the main cause."
United States Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
AEI asked Arizona Senator John McCain to give a policy address on how to achieve victory in Afghanistan. The 25 February, 2009 address was billed as a follow-up to the Senator's "seminal AEI address on 'Winning the War in Iraq'". Similar to his previous AEI-sponsored speech on Iraq, Senator McCain encouraged the United States to rethink its strategy, as well as to increase the number of soldiers in the country. In the speech, McCain told AEI that the U.S. cannot succeed in Afghanistan without "more than [doubling] the current size of the Afghan army to 160,000 troops," and possibly "enlarging it to 200,000." Senator McCain also commented that "We will fail in Afghanistan without a serious change in both strategy and resources."
See also
External links
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