A service organization for think tanks
Atlas Network is described on The Bob Zadek Show as an organization that serves a worldwide network of think tanks rather than conducting policy work itself. Tom Palmer, identified as Executive Vice President for International Programs at Atlas Network, told listeners that the organization functions primarily as a service organization for a network of 458 organizations in 98 different countries Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017). Those organizations, Palmer said, promote limited government, peace, personal freedom and responsibility, toleration, free trade, and market economy — values he described as classical liberal, now called libertarian in America.
Matt Warner, identified as President of the Atlas Network, gave a longer account of the model on a later episode How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020). He explained that the think tanks in the network are nonprofit institutions independent of government, looking at policy solutions intended to increase economic freedom and individual freedom. Warner traced the network’s origin to the 1950s, when its founder established a think tank in London that Margaret Thatcher later credited with being the intellectual foundation of her reforms. By the time of the broadcast, he said, the number of think tanks fitting that mold was around 500, in more than 90 countries.
Warner described three pillars of Atlas Network’s work: grant-making as financial support for think tank projects, training in think tank excellence and in policy reform ideas from around the world, and — most importantly, in his telling — providing a network of peers. He said the programming is peer-driven and deliberately non-prescriptive, describing competitions, awards, and case studies used to circulate ideas rather than to copy them.
Host Bob Zadek framed Warner’s description as “global federalism,” comparing it to the Brandeis description of states as laboratories of innovation, and drew a parallel to the principle that states are better at solving their problems than Washington and cities better than states How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020). That framing is Zadek’s, offered as his own reaction to the model Warner described.
Self-control versus state control
Atlas Network appears in the January 2017 episode chiefly through Palmer’s book Self-Control or State-Control?, which listeners were told they could obtain through an Atlas Network web address Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017). Palmer’s argument in that segment concerned how rules are made rather than whether rules exist. When Zadek asked whether environmentalism requires state control or whether state control exacerbates environmental problems, Palmer distinguished between government directives telling people specifically what they must and must not do, which he said have generally quite negative consequences, and government action that defines and secures rights through the rule of law, which he endorsed.
Palmer illustrated the first case with the environmental record of what he called real existing socialism, calling it an environmental catastrophe and naming the Aral Sea as completely dead. Under the second approach, he said, if he pollutes someone else’s air or poisons their water, he should be held accountable as a tort matter, a civil matter, or a criminal matter. Liability rules and property rules, he argued, give people a longer horizon and make them responsible for harm, and he said the evidence is strong that this approach to environmental regulation is better than empowering bureaucrats to dictate behavior.
In the earlier 2012 episode, Palmer made a similar argument in the course of a caller exchange The Morality of Capitalism (2012). Answering a caller from Berkeley who said that what is good for one person may be deleterious to others and particularly the environment, Palmer distinguished one-size-fits-all socialism from free-market capitalism and identified pollution as the classic example of spillover effects. He said that polluting someone else’s front yard, water supply, or air harms them just as if he had shot a bullet at the person, and that such harm should be illegal; protecting people against being harmed is, he said, what property rights are about. Where government allows pollution, he said, it is because it is not enforcing property rights, and he called protecting our property and our lives government’s fundamental responsibility.
In the 2017 episode, Palmer credited a chapter by Lynne Kiesling from Northwestern University, which he said he commissioned for the book, on environmental policy and regulation Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017). His summary of her argument was that rules of property and contract are institutions of human life that are part of government, that all markets are regulated, and that the real question is whether to use institutions that function well or to give unaccountable or barely accountable bureaucrats discretionary power to change the rules. Zadek pressed that this yields not private rules but governmental rules.
Foreign aid and the outsider’s dilemma
The March 2020 episode brought Warner on to discuss Poverty and Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development, a book he edited, and the argument that top-down foreign aid fails because of what he called the “outsider’s dilemma” How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020). Warner cited the scale of the American aid effort — close to $50 billion a year, the largest donor in absolute dollars, most of it flowing through USAID, the State Department, and the Defense Department — and noted that the UN’s suggested target of 0.7 percent of GDP is met mostly by Scandinavians, whose absolute contributions are less than 10 percent of the American total.
Warner said the aid community has become introspective about two questions: how to measure whether aid works, and how often it does more harm than good. He offered the example of a project in Uganda in which $300,000 was spent so that a village of 7,000 farmers could switch from banana crops to corn crops, on the recommendation of researchers from Columbia University who expected a better yield. The yield did increase, Warner said, but there was no one to sell the extra crop to and nowhere to store it, rats infested the village, and the farmers had lost the banana crop they understood how to make the most of. He presented this as one of many cases where good intentions are not enough.
Zadek’s framing of the alternative was again the federalism analogy: local think tanks solve problems better because cures vary from locale to locale even where the causes of poverty are common. Warner extended the theme to the meetings and training programs, telling listeners that the reason freedom leads to prosperity is that it allows constant learning and correction, and that no one in charge decides what everyone should be doing.
Across episodes: property rights and local knowledge
Across the two Palmer episodes, the treatment of property rights as the answer to environmental harm is consistent: pollution is described as an invasion of another person’s property in the 2012 conversation and again in 2017, with the 2017 discussion adding the distinction between rule-of-law institutions and bureaucratic discretion, and adding Lynne Kiesling’s commissioned chapter. What changes between the 2012 and 2017 episodes is not the argument but the venue: in 2012 Atlas Network appears only as the address where Palmer’s earlier book could be obtained, and in 2017 it becomes the subject of Zadek’s closing questions, with Palmer supplying the 458-organizations-in-98-countries figure. The 2020 episode advances a different aspect — Warner’s account of the network’s grant-making, training, and meetings, and of foreign aid’s failures — and the excerpts show no dispute among the guests about the network’s purpose.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts identify Palmer’s title at Atlas Network and Warner’s, and Palmer’s figure for the network’s size alongside Warner’s roughly 500 think tanks in more than 90 countries, but they give no founding date for the organization, no account of its funding, and no description of its governance. The Uganda project, the aid figures, and the Burundi case named in the episode’s topics are reported only as Warner states them in the excerpts, without further documentation. Nothing in the excerpts states what any particular think tank in the network has done, and the reference to a case study on business licensing is cut off before it begins.