A Think Tank for Liberty: A Personal History of Reason Foundation

Of the 484 free-market think tanks in ninety-two countries around the world, the Reason Foundation has become a world leader for its practical libertarian solutions to serious public policy problems at the local, state, and national levels.

Unlike the caricature of libertarians as people too impractical and radical for the real world of American government, Reason has an unmatched record of implementing highly successful, often cost-saving, reforms to improve public services for the typical American.

Based in California for most of its fifty years and with a satellite office in Washington, DC Reason now has a staff of more than seventy and an annual budget of over $13 million.

Poole, a self-described MIT-educated nerdy young introvert engineer, was cofounder and long-time Reason Foundation CEO until stepping down in 2001 to focus on transportation infrastructure policy. He narrates the remarkable story of this uniquely American public policy center and the dramatic effect it continues to have on economic policy issues all around the world.

The foundation s research and commentary reaches the general public and policymakers through its print magazine, Reason (first published in 1968 as a monthly for free minds and free markets ), and online at Reason.org and Reason.com, plus its television programming at Reason.tv each an outlet for alternatives to left- and right-wing policy positions.

As Poole writes, he developed a very results-oriented approach to policy change. Instead of measuring success by the number of media appearances . . . our real measure of success is policy ideas that get implemented. This work has led to a large array of changes in city and state services delivery, transportation infrastructure, school choice, public pension reform, and a number of other areas. For example, the foundation s impressive Pension Integrity Project has led to serious reforms adopted in Arizona, Michigan, and South Carolina states whose major reforms of their underfunded public pension systems many believed were politically impossible.

In addition to its policy research, the foundation has trained many prominent scholars and journalists, including the op-ed page editor of the Wall Street Journal, as well as think-tank executives and noted authors.

Poole remains an optimist about the future of liberty here and abroad, but he also issues telling warnings about both populism and the growth of America s unaccountable national administrative state in this compelling and highly readable memoir.

Robert Poole and his wife, Lou, reside in Plantation, Florida. He is the author of Cutting Back City Hall (1980) and Rethinking America s Highways (2018), and the editor of four other Reason Foundation books.

He has written scores of policy studies and many hundreds of articles and op-ed pieces over his career. He has advised White House domestic policy offices in the Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Trump White Houses, as well as the US Department of Transportation and many state DOTs.

He has served on a number of government advisory boards, as well as on special committees of the National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and other leading papers, and he has been interviewed on Crossfire, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, NPR, and PBS. Poole received his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and began his career as an aerospace engineer before moving into the think-tank world.