Idea factories

How understanding where “our” ideas come from can help us have better ideas

This piece was co-authored by Sandro Galea, and his version is cross-posted here.

The very business of writing a Substack blog like this one is to help me generate and think about ideas. I find this type of writing encourages me to think beyond areas I am comfortable or familiar with. At times I am not sure how I feel about something until I write about it. The purpose of sharing these blogs is in hope is that some people read them, they provoke reflection, and perhaps generate other ideas that ultimately become useful out there in the real world.

In the spirit of being self-reflective about our role in idea generation, Sandro and I launched a series we have been calling Ideas about Ideas, reflections about where these ideas come from as people who didn’t necessarily expect to find ourselves in this type of occupation or craft. In our last Ideas about Ideas post, we talked about the social life of ideas. Today, we share some reflections on the structures that give rise to and perpetuate ideas.

It can be tempting to think of ideas as if they arrive to us, as individuals, in flashes of insight or inspiration. But most ideas are arguably not born that way. Instead, they are products that have been made. Ideas have funders, deadlines, and production targets. They are the output of groups, networks, incentives, and institutions within which we all live. And that has implications for how we understand the ideas that we ourselves have, and how we engage with, absorb, agree or disagree with the ideas of others.

Universities, but also think tanks, newsrooms, and now digital platforms can be thought of as part of a kind of “assembly line” for thought. They are like idea factories. They collect raw material, refine it into concepts and ideas, and package it for public consumption. That is how some of the concepts and ideas that have dramatically shaped our modern world and language have emerged, from free-market economics to literally world-encompassing (and potentially ending) concepts such as “mutually assured destruction” (which was first posited by a think tank employee, Donald Brennan, working in Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute, in 1962). We often do not realise just how much this is the case, even though we may refer to, or live in, a world that is a deep embodiment of those ideas. What we consider as fundamental, optional, or heretical, is not purely a feature of our own personalities, beliefs and reason, but instead is in part a result of the ideas that have been layered around us.

This brings to mind Meryl Streep’s monologue in the film “The Devil Wears Prada”, about the influence of fashion on every day clothing, which Sandro used to great effect in his book Well.

“This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean.

And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact…you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of “stuff.””

This is not a new story. In her seminal work of investigative journalism Dark Money, Jane Mayer traces how, beginning in the 1970s, a small number of wealthy donors set out to reshape the American intellectual landscape. Their insight was simple, but devastatingly effective: They acted on the basis that ideas have infrastructure. First, the donors funded university chairs and academic centres that could give their ideological positions a scholarly veneer. Then, when academic culture proved too slow or sceptical, they built new institutions, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, that were designed for speed, networking with policy-makers, and media access.

What Mayer describes is almost like the industrialization of thought, the deliberate creation of parallel structure for ideas that could compete with, and eventually dominate, older forms of knowledge production. The result was something of an intellectual supply chain that moved ideas from donor intent, to white paper, to op-ed, to policy proposal, to law. The now famous Powell memorandum offers a textbook example of this very deliberately constructed dynamic. Written in 1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the memo outlined a clear strategy for conservative and business interests to combat what he saw then as a growing anti-business sentiment in the United States, through coordinated action by businesses, universities, think tanks, the media, and policy-makers. I would encourage you to read it, as it is a genuine example of hearing these strategies laid out “in their own words”.

When we understand that ideas can and do emerge from such organized systems, even if we, the actors within these systems, may think that we are having our own, independent ideas, it seems not remiss to think of the role and construction of idea factories, as the places whose job it is to generate these ideas. Surely these deserve careful scrutiny, and observation, to make sure that the ideas that are emerging from these factories are indeed useful, helpful, and point towards a greater good.

The architecture of ideas

If Dark Money showed how ideas can be built to order (often with profoundly harmful and at times unintentional results), Pierre Bourdieu explained why and how the construction process works as it does. He described intellectual life as a set of fields, spaces that each have their own hierarchies and rules of the road, almost like games in their own right. Within a field, value might be determined not only by what is said, but by who says it, and from where, and that might vary. Universities, for example, confer legitimacy through citation, affiliation, and peer review. Think tanks trade in access and proximity to power. Media institutions translate ideas into narrative, shaping which of them are visible enough to matter. Each field produces its own form of capital, but the boundaries between these forms are quite porous. A scholar with a compelling paper may find themselves reinterpreted through an advocates priorities, then translated through a journalist’s lens, then refracted again through a policymaker’s speech. By the time the idea reaches the public, it has moved through several layers of filtration, each adding or removing something to make it fit the demands of its next environment. The result is that such ideas do not simply compete in the wider marketplace of ideas but are in subtle ways manufactured for it, honed for it, through these processes.

Bruno Latour saw this from a different angle. In his account of laboratories, facts are not simply discovered but assembled. They move through stages of testing, inscription, translation, and persuasion until they become stable enough to circulate as truth. He contended that objectivity is not the absence of human influence, but the product of a collective process that hides its machinery. What Bourdieu and Latour share is the recognition that knowledge does not emerge in a vacuum, but is social as much as intellectual. The problem, then, is not that we have idea factories. One could argue that while we might not realise the extent to which ideas are socially produced, the fact they are is not in of itself a problem. Instead, the challenge is when the production lines that develop and then shape and hone such ideas have been captured by particular ideologies or logics, and then become socially distorted. These could include the marketisation of academia for example, or the politicisation of think tanks, the algorithmic imperatives of platforms, or the increasing reliance of news media on digital advertising. Each of these systems then rewards different things, perhaps novelty, visibility, outrage, the creation, or re-entrenchment, of silos or groups, all of which shape what kinds of ideas we end up with, and which ones quietly die on the shop floor. We should care about that, especially if you are of the view that we need better ideas than the ones that tend to keep dominating.

Who gets to work in idea factories

Every factory has a workforce, and the production of ideas is no exception. The people who typically generate, refine, and legitimate ideas, including researchers, journalists, analysts and policymakers, are not a random sample of society. They are drawn overwhelmingly from certain educational, socioeconomic, and cultural strata. Their worlds are shaped by the institutions that trained them, the audiences they imagine when they write, but also, on a human level, their own life experiences, who they go home to, socialise with, or consider as peers. Universities, think tanks, and major media organisations share this structural imbalance.

Entry into these spaces still depends heavily on early educational opportunity and inherited social capital. This matters, because the ideas that emerge from these institutions often reflect not only the evidence available, but also the worldviews of those producing them. In other words, there are social determinants of knowledge, just as there are social determinants of health, an observation that is at the core of our overarching ideas about ideas series. This means that when public debate or policy analysis feels abstracted from lived reality, it is rarely accidental, but rather a natural consequence of the distance between those who form key elements of idea factories, and those who live with the consequences of those ideas. If an idea factory is staffed largely by people who share similar class backgrounds, housing situations, and health security, certain questions will naturally feel more “interesting,” “tractable,” or “urgent” than others. And entire domains of experience, such as poverty or marginalisation, can become more objects of study, and less of a shared experience.

This is both an ethical problem and an epistemic one. Knowledge that lacks diversity of experience risks becoming self-referential. It can end up circulating within closed loops of peer recognition and professional reward, what Bourdieu might have called the “illusio” of the field. He uses this term to describe the ways in which the arbitrariness of a field’s rules and norms become an engrained, shared, seemingly natural pursuit, in which individuals are emotionally invested in what is really a type of game, and one they may not realize is separate from a reality that fully represents the world around us. The result is not just inequality in who participates in knowledge production, but distortion in what kinds of knowledge we collectively produce and why. If we take seriously the idea of public health as the organized efforts of society, then we must also confront how narrow a slice of society is currently empowered to organise those efforts, on what terms, and with what incentives. The same goes for economics, political science, law or technology, all domains where ideas are developed, honed, and hammered into the shape of future society through policy development and implementation. Without deliberate widening of participation, we risk reproducing, intellectually, the inequalities we seek to understand and reduce.

Reimagining the Idea Factory

There is a great deal of mistrust, anger and disillusionment about the role of research, academia, experts, evidence, and the other traditional institutions that have formed the long-standing walls, production floor and employees of idea factories. At times ideas are disputed as much because of where they came from, as what they represent, or what evidence supports their validity. While much of this might reflect the heat of current public debate in the age of social media, it perhaps also speaks some truth about the blind spots, perverse incentives, and inequalities of our long-standing idea factories. When we understand that ideas do emerge from the structures around them, we can sharpen our thinking to ask: how do we create better factories, better conditions for ideas to emerge? Could those conditions be more diverse, more reflective, more morally conscious, more accountable to the societies they serve? That would mean treating intellectual diversity as part of the essential infrastructure of ideas factories, not optional enrichment, or more cynically, garnish.

There are some areas in which this is clearly already happening, for example, where the barriers between the “illusio” of academia and wider society are being consciously made more porous. For example, collaborative platforms that connect citizen scientists with academic researchers, independent media that experiment with slow journalism, community-led research partnerships that invert traditional hierarchies of expertise. These are still very much exceptions, but they hint at what a more plural and democratic ecosystem of knowledge might look like, in which ideas circulate not just downward, from experts to publics, but horizontally, across communities and disciplines, and upward, from acute needs to foundational principles and research and policy goals.

In this light, the challenge before us is not only intellectual but institutional, about structures that enable productive osmotic movements between fields and communities, and incentives that promote them. To build idea factories that look less like assembly lines and more like commons, where knowledge is co-created, shared, and cared for as a collective asset. If the 20th century was defined by the industrialisation of ideas, the 21st might yet be defined by their reinvention. The question, as ever, is whether we can summon the humility and imagination to make that shift, before our idea factories, too, become monuments to a form of thinking that once seemed unassailable.

The Ideas about Ideas project

The Ideas about Ideas project, co-written with Sandro Galea, and cross-posted on his The Healthiest Goldfish substack, is a series of reflections of how thought lives in the world. It follows ideas as they emerge in institutions and everyday life, as they move across borders, as they harden into orthodoxy or fade into silence. It argues that ideas are not possessions but shared conditions of living, and that to see them clearly is to recognize both their power and the obligations they impose. Fundamentally, this project is built on the notion that without ideas we have nothing, and that the business of creating a healthier, better world rests on ideas.