Think tanks

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80,000 Hours rates working at a think tank highly in terms of impact potential, career capital and job satisfaction, and recommendrecommends this path for candidates early in their careers and suited for it.

In general, there is great diversity in the think tank ecosystem and experts often note that there is no such thing as a prototypical think tank: these organizations differ amongfrom one another across a number ofseveral important dimensions, such as "in how they are funded, the roles that they play, their attitudes toward 'neutral expertise', their recruitment of staff, and their 'product lines.'"[1] Moreover, the boundaries between think tanks and other types of entities with a mandate to supply policy advice, such as pressure groups, private foundations, academic institutes, policy schools, government agencies, and non-government organizations are sometimes blurry.

By contrast, research think tanks (sometimes called "ink tanks") are not antecedently committed—at least not explicitly—to policy proposals with a particular ideological bent and are mostly focusedfocus primarily on generating novel policy insights. A subset of these think tanks resemble academic institutions in many respects, and are as such sometimes referred to as "universities without students": organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, to name some examples, are mostly staffed mainly by researchers holding doctoral degrees and publish their research in scholarly books or monographs, although these think tanks are usually  (but not always) organizationally independent of academia and have a much closer contact with policy activists and a heavier emphasis on practical applicability. Other research think tanks, by contrast, operate in a manner more similar to consultancies: most work by the RAND Corporation, for instance, is focused on program evaluations requested and funded by government agencies.

Think tanks do not only differ greatlysignificantly in their structure; there is also great diversity in the type and extent of their impact. Andrew Rich and Kent Weaver summarize:[2]

Open Philanthropy has given grants to a number ofseveral think tanks working in a variety of areas, including the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (artificial intelligence), the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (biosecurity and pandemic preparedness), Dezernat Zukunft (macroeconomic policy), the Center for Global Development (immigration reform), the Good Food Institute (animal product alternatives), Nuclear Threat Initiative (biosecurity and global catastrophic biological risks), the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (macroeconomic policy), and the Sightline Institute (land use reform).