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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Man, how does one get hired by a think tank? It's always seemed like the ideal job to me.

I've worked for 4 different libertarian/right leaning think tanks. 2 of them as basically an intern, and two of them as web developer after I worked in private industry for a while.

I'd recommend against it.

The cons:

  1. Pay is shit
  2. Internal politics at these places is rough. Far worse than companies because competency won't protect you, and far worse than the government because firing is easy.
  3. You aren't making a difference. The right leaning organizations mostly end up designed to bleed old rich people of their money. Being effective has some correlation with that but not much. The leftist organizations end up designed to bleed the government, old people, and other organizations of their money.

The pros:

  1. As easy as a government job, no one knows if you are effective or not. No profit to say you succeeded. Fundraising is the exception, everyone knows if they are successful. That is basically a sales job.
  2. Less rules. Drink and do drugs in the office, hookup with underlings, and just have some mediocre level of output and be likeable.
  3. Occasionally feel like you are doing something and your job is meaningful, also most people outside the industry will think you are doing something meaningful. You are wrong in the moment and they are wrong in general, but feeling good things is still nice.

Very high verbal IQ, a minimal mercenary quality, and a willingness to accept below market rate salaries are the minima. Oh, and you also have to move around a lot.

Based off of my family and social circle involved in this: be an upper middle to upper class white woman who went to an elite institution, get a semi-rigorous degree and be riotously far to the left and incredibly racist (anti-white).

The other people who got into that sort of role and were typical motivated by public service types, actual minorities and so on seem to bounce out but the ones that keep getting kicked up the ladder seem to match that description. The actual ownership class for the various firms is what you'd usually expect, but the people who do the stuff and middle management is pure Karen in my experience.

I have two acquaintances who have worked at think tanks.

Using those two data points, I think you should work on being a female minority who has really strong opinions about Queering the Narrative In Education.

Once you've done that, maybe get a master's in public policy or something?

Graduate hires are usually political science / policy studies / government type grads from relatively good to elite universities (say like Georgetown) who intern there (they recruit from these places).

More senior hires and leads are usually either ex-government (either civil servants or elected politicians), or academics. You see people from industry, like finance, contracting or journalists, too depending on what it is.

I interned at Independent Institute back in 2008. I figure if I'd gone to graduate school and made more of a go at writing papers I might today be working there.

What sort of "think tank" are you looking for? RAND has jobs posted on their web site. So does the Heritage Foundation even, it seems.

But I can imagine more niche options that look like billionaires' pet policy promotion are probably in practice patronage programs.

You need to be a writer first.

If you've gotta ask and/or aren't an elite-tier striver you're probably not getting in.

Also how much do thinktanks actually pay? I get that it's a 'job' but I always assumed it'd be more a posting for people with familial resources to vibe around whilst the thinktank itself didn't actually have that much money

I once dated a girl who worked for the RAND corporation. She had a graduate degree in sociology or public policy or something equally useless-sounding. As best as I can recall, the job involved performing studies into topics that were so boring they weren't even worth asking about. Like the Regional Industrial Development Corporation commissioning a study to determine how employment outcomes in certain industries for people with 2-year technical degrees compared with other types of training. Based on her lifestyle, I'm assuming the pay was about average.

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