Idea Factories

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

This piece was co-authored by Dr Nason Maani, and is cross-posted here.

The very business of writing a Substack blog is to generate ideas, to hope that some people read them, that they provoke reflection, and generate even other ideas. Because fundamentally ideas are the raw material of progress, the foundation that then can become action. In the spirit of being self-reflective about this idea generation, we launched a series we have been calling Ideas about Ideas, reflections about where these very ideas come from. In our last Ideas about Ideas post, we talked about the social life of ideas. Today, some reflections on the structures that give rise to ideas, that 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 not born that way. Instead, they are products that have been made. Ideas have funders, deadlines, and production targets. They are the output of 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.

What does that look like?

Universities, think tanks, newsrooms, and now digital platforms can be thought of as part of a kind of assembly line for thought. They collect raw material, refine it into concepts and ideas, and package it for public consumption. That is how many 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, an example I had used in my 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, that ideas have infrastructure. First, the donors funded university chairs and academic centres that could give ideological positions a scholarly gloss. 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, media access, and policy proximity. These structures did not just win debates. They changed what it meant to be in the debate.

What Mayer describes is 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 law. The now famous Powell memorandum offers a textbook example of this 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.

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 Idea Factories, as the places whose job it is to generate these ideas, and which then 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 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. 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, be that symbolic, cultural, financial. The boundaries between these forms are porous. A scholar with a compelling paper may find themselves reinterpreted 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 ideas do not simply compete in the marketplace of ideas but are 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. His point was not cynical but revealing, that objectivity is not the absence of human influence, but the product of a collective process that hides its machinery. Yet what Bourdieu and Latour share is the recognition that knowledge does not emerge in a vacuum. It is social before it is intellectual. The problem, then, is not that we have idea factories, as we need some form of them to persist. It is that the production lines that develop and then shape and hone such ideas have been captured by particular logics: the marketisation of academia, the politicisation of think tanks, and the algorithmic imperatives of platforms. Each of these systems rewards different things, perhaps novelty, visibility, outrage, the creation, or re-entrenchment, of silos or groups, but all of them shape what kinds of ideas we end up with, and which ones quietly die on the shop floor.

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 all share this structural imbalance.

Entry into these spaces still depends heavily on early educational opportunity, inherited social capital, and the ability to navigate professional norms coded to a narrow slice of experience. 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 shared experience.

This is both an ethical problem and an epistemic one. Knowledge that lacks diversity of experience risks becoming self-referential. It circulates 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. 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

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 idees 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. It would mean recognizing that the capacity to think slowly, collaboratively, and across difference, is a public good in itself.

I must admit to some personal interest in this question, being in the business for the past year of creating a new School of Public Health at Washington University. I find myself asking often: how do we make sure that we build a structure that is a positive environment that creates better ideas? What does an exceptional School within a university look like? I find inspiration from any number of places where many are leading a reimagining of how we generate ideas. 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 exceptions, but they hint at what a more plural, interdisciplinary, 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. In this light, the challenge before us is not only intellectual but institutional. We need to rethink not just the ideas we produce, but the architectures that produce 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 Dr Nason Maani, and cross-posted on the Money, Power, Health 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.

__ __ __

Also this week

With Austin Kilaru and Julie Donohue, “A look ahead for health policy and health services research” in JAMA Health Forum.

Also, the release of the JAMA Summit report on reducing firearms violence and harms, “Toward a Safer World by 2040: The JAMA Summit Report on Reducing Firearm Violence and Harms” in JAMA. If interested see also the prior “Academic Public Health and the Firearm Crisis: An Agenda for Action” in the American Journal of Public Health.