The Ideas Industry began as an examination of all of the various people and institutions involved in creating, curating, and disseminating foreign policy ideas. Over the course of the writing of the book, it gradually broadened its focus to ideas of all kinds.

There is a lot to be said for this book, first and foremost that it exists at all. There are any number of books which critique the news and opinion media, and others that critique academia, and an even smaller number that critique think tanks and the “institution” of the thought leader and public intellectual. There are not very many books which investigate all of them as curators and distributers of public policy ideas. So this book is a welcome addition, because it collates a lot of important critiques in a single place. It is really helpful to compare and contrast the role that each of these institutions plays in crafting foreign policy thought.

Unfortunately, this book glosses over important distinctions between the world of foreign policy thought, and the broader arena of policy ideas generally. To be sure, there is a great deal in common between them - but there are also important distinctions. Almost by definition foreign policy is less immediate and less likely to have tangible impacts for the average citizen in the US. As a result the average citizen really has no choice but to rely heavily on the foreign policy experts for their assessment of one idea or another; or to tune out foreign policy debates altogether. That is, engagement with these sorts of ideas is likely to be very much bimodal, whereas engagement with domestic policy ideas is likely to be more normal. I don’t think that distinction totally up-ends everything written in the book, but it does probably mean that Drezner’s critiques miss some of the softened impact that each of these institutions have in domestic policy circles.

It’s also interesting that this book closely tracks the mechanics of idea curation and distribution, but doesn’t really investigate the way those ideas behave in the real world. Reading this book one might think that containment and democratic adventurism were fairly successful - after all they both circulated reasonably well in foreign policy institutions in their time. Both of these ideas also gave rise to two of the most disastrous wars in the last 50 years, in Vietnam and Iraq respectively. So where is the accountability within the system? Drezner does sort of address this question when he takes apart the rise and fall of Clayton Christensen’s blockbuster book on disruptive technology. His point there is well taken, but it’s odd, for a book on foreign policy, to completely ignore some of these disastrous failures of foreign policy thinking. How deep does this crisis in idea curation go, and what responsibility do thinkers have for their ideas, once they are actually enacted? Difficult to say!

Drezner is deeply concerned, and rightly so, with the influence of deep pockets on the world of policy ideas. But for all that I think he’s a little blind to just how deep that influence goes: he seems pretty happy to go along with the fact that lower trade barriers are unanimously endorsed by leading thinkers, without pausing to consider whether those endorsements might have just a tinge of bias to them. (And he also ignores the sharp critque leveled at this policy from economists like Dean Baker, union leaders, etc.)

Indeed, the title of this book not only supports but actually extends the central metaphor we use to talk about the mechanics of public policy ideation. Whereas we once talked about these mechanics as a marketplace of ideas, Drezner critiques the ideas industry. If you accept the notion that ideation is a primarily economic activity, then the title makes a certain degree of sense. After all, Drezner is concerned with the decline of public intellectuals - people capable of critiquing ideas from a wide variety of domains - and the concomitant rise of thought leaders who make their living by promoting a single idea over and over. It’s all very clever - public intellectuals are the small-time shopkeepers in the marketplace of ideas, thought leaders are the factories of the ideas industry. The only problem is that ideation is not primarily an economic activity, and the success or failure of an idea can’t be measured like a stock price.

Perhaps the single best example in recent times is the Affordable Care Act. It began life as a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation, a response to Bill Clinton’s attempt to overhaul the health insurance system. Massachusetts implemented the proposal at a statewide level in 2006, the result of a compromise between Republican Governor Mitt Romney and Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy. In 2010 the fundamentals of this idea became law when a Democratic House and Senate passed it, and of course Democratic President Obama signed it. In 2017, Republicans with control of Congress and the Presidency tried mightily to repeal it, and failed in the face of overwhelming opposition from the progressive movement. So what do we make of this strange idea? In terms of actual policy it’s an enormous success, having touched the lives of millions of people and enjoying pretty good popularity in the polls. At the same time it’s a success that its “owner”, the conservative movement, completely and totally disavows. That’s not exactly the behavior of a typical economic product, but I don’t think it’s such an unusual trajectory for a public policy idea.

My view is that this central metaphor underlying the world of public policy ideation is simply very flawed, and perhaps even contributes to the same problems that Drezner bemoans. If ideation is an industry, then absolutely it makes sense to become a thought leader who markets her own idea to the exclusion of everything else. On the other hand if we think about ideation as a different kind of endeavor, with a different sort of metaphor - for example, public policy ideas are a way to investigate of the world around us, and therefore the world of ideation is like a giant laboratory - then we perhaps encourage very different types of behavior. Certainly, it’s not Drezner’s job to single-handedly up-end decades of practices in the world of ideation, but it’s a little curious that he doesn’t really question them, and in fact endorses them to some degree.

All that said - I found this book really fascinating, particularly as relates to the minutae surrounding the actual work involved in idea curation and distribution. The chapter on leading thought leaders (Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson) was fairly illuminating in that regard. I also appreciated learning the term “heuristict punch”, which applies to ideas that are readily understood and powerfully persuasive - it really stuck out at me as succinctly capturing what is really a complex phenomenon in writing and thought. And I quite enjoyed the discussion of what I’d call the granularity of certainty: academic writing is full of nuance and careful consideration, whereas popular writing requires clear, forceful conclusions. The difficulty of translating between one and the other turns out to be a significant stumbling block in making academic findings readily available to the lay public, and has a major impact on the way we distribute ideas.

On the whole, I’d certainly recommend this book to anyone who is curious about the mechanics of policy thought - but I would add that it’s a bit uneven.