The Institute of Economic Affairs

One of the most impressive examples of the dissemination of ideology through educational activities has been performed by the UK- based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in 1955. Dedicated to the idea of free-markets the IEA from the beginning saw the "education" of the public as a key element in the distribution of their ideology. "The philosophy of the market economy must be widely accepted; this requires a large programme of education ..."

Aiming at the wide acceptance of their ideas, the IEA undertook an extensive publishing program with the objective to make the fairly complex concepts of economic liberalism and monetarism available to a student or sixth-form audience. In the 1960s IEA papers normally reached the hands of students through the university Conservative Associations.

The work that the IEA did in this field reaped a rich harvest during the 1970s and 1980s, as many of the younger political activists who staffed the various free-market think-tanks, such as the Center for Policy Studies, the Freedom Association an the Selsdon Group, received their education from the IEA. Especially at St. Andrews university, where Ralph Harris, the first director of the IEA, had been a lecturer, the IEA ideas had a strong impact. St. Andrews over the years did not only produce a generation of free-market Conservative MPs (Member of Parliament), but also influenced former St. Andrews students like Stuart and Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie, who went to set up the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) in London in 1976.

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Funding Sources and Revenues

While most progressive think tanks acquire their funding through many different sources, for conservative think tanks financing by corporations prevails. Among the think tanks receiving a considerable amount of corporate money are the Cato Institute (U.S. conservative/libertarian), the Brookings Institution (U.S. centrist), the Heritage Foundation (U.S. conservative), the American Enterprise Institute (U.S. conservative) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (U.S. conservative).

Also, whereas the combined revenue base of such conservative multi-issue policy institutions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy exceeded US$ 77 million in 1995, the roughly equivalent U.S. progressive Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities had only US$ 9 million at their collective disposal in 1995.

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Ron Rivest

Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the RSA public-key cryptosystem. The co-authors were Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman.

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Galileo Galilee

Galileo Galilee (1564-1642), the Italian Mathematician and Physicist is called the father of Enlightenment. He proofed the laws of the free fall, improved the technique for the telescope and so on. Galilee is still famous for his fights against the Catholic Church. He published his writings in Italian instead of writing in Latin. Like this, everybody could understand him, which made him popular. As he did not stop talking about the world as a ball (the Heliocentric World System) instead of a disk, the Inquisition put him on trial twice and forbid him to go on working on his experiments.

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