40 Years After Atlas Network’s Original Workshop

Forty years ago this week, Atlas Network held its first event in Vancouver, British Columbia, attached to a larger meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. This milestone provides a good opportunity to reflect on what’s changed and what has remained the same among the community of public policy and educational institutes that engage with Atlas Network to advance liberty.

First, some background for newcomers…

Atlas Network was founded by Sir Antony Fisher and his second wife, Dorian, in San Francisco in 1981 as Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Sir Antony had already launched a free-market think tank—Institute of Economic Affairs—in London in the 1950s which had risen in influence. During the 1970s, he joined the board of the start-up Fraser Institute in Canada, and he co-founded what became the Manhattan Institute. He was convinced that non-partisan think tanks could be cost-effective instruments for improving the public’s appreciation of limited government and free enterprise—both essential for protecting the freedom and dignity of the individual.

Fisher saw the need for an organization that could help others replicate this experiment, so more societies would stay free of the communist authoritarianism that had been on the march over the past quarter century, and so more societies would avoid the temptations of an expansive welfare state that can be ruinous to public debt and the health of the market economy.

Fisher created Atlas Economic Research Foundation with letters of endorsement from famed economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, as well as then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. His initial focus was raising funds that could be distributed to a dozen upstart think tanks in his rolodex. Several had already proved their worth championing ideas about privatizing government-run enterprises, removing regulations—such as rent control—that caused shortages, and restructuring tax codes to spark economic growth.

Today, the organization that Sir Antony created is branded as Atlas Network and is the hub of a global community of more than 550 mission-aligned partner organizations. Annually, it awards approximately $7 million in grants and prizes to this community, and it may see an even greater return on investment in how it engages with its partners. Atlas Network has a robust Academy through which it provides training and mentorship to rising leaders; it convenes Summits of top think tank CEOs and COOs across the world; and it convenes five international conferences on five continents each year.

But back in 1983, Antony Fisher had not yet tried to bring together his far-flung friends of “intellectual entrepreneurs.” It was Sally Pipes who identified the opportunity. Sally would eventually become the President and CEO of Pacific Research Institute, but at the time she was working under Michael Walker at the Fraser Institute as he organized a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Vancouver. The MPS was entirely devoted to the task of bringing together classical liberal academics to debate and discuss topics pertinent to the future of free societies. Sally Pipes noted that several think tank leaders were planning to attend, and it might be fruitful to organize a side event to discuss what was working and what was not for those engaged in building free-market institutes.

The First Workshop

The event on September 2–3, 1983, in Vancouver became the first in a series of 38 International Workshops that Atlas Network convened between 1983 and 2000. After 2000, Atlas Network shifted its focus to an annual Liberty Forum held in the U.S.—which multiplied in 2016 into five annual Liberty Forums, including new regional ones for Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America—and regular training programs that put more structure to the task of helping think tank leaders and personnel climb various learning curves.

However, the basic template for what came later was set in Vancouver during this two-day meeting. The workshop was focused on practical lessons, sourced from those with experience in building programs to popularize free-market ideas. There was no presumption that a single recipe would work in all situations, though many of the participants felt strongly about core governing principles.

There are 29 participants listed as contributing to the discussion, though the late John Blundell estimated that another 10 to 12 likely sat in as observers. Dorian Fisher took notes, which she turned into a 64 page “Manual” that had the subtitle: “Some Do’s and Don’ts for Public Policy Institutes.” It was neatly organized into seven sections and 41 subsections, while also providing appendices inventorying the institutes represented and their catalogs of publications at the time.

Much of what Dorian recorded at the meeting explains the ambitions of these pioneers of the modern liberty movement.

Milton Friedman explained:

The dominance of the collectivist idea was the result of an intellectual effort; to change this will require influencing intellectuals. That is the job of the "retailers of ideas" (institutes) in conjunction with the "manufacturers" (academics) themselves.

Ralph Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK explained the importance of staying independent and welcoming of allies from across the ideological spectrum:

One doesn't intend to create a narrow orthodoxy, or to align oneself with any political party or parties, or to conduct propaganda. The work in which we are engaged has lessons to people in all parties . [My colleague] Arthur Seldon moderated my natural combativeness, saying, "Let's fight them in the footnotes." Thus, many of the people that I was inclined to attack have become ... our most devoted followers. Our job is to go on making friends, rather than entrenching enemies.

Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute counseled that the timeline for social change is not something that can be commanded, which means it is critical for think tanks to patiently build credibility in their brand by providing trustworthy research and analysis. He mused:

The critical turning points in human affairs are when there is a sudden change in people's demand for truth. The ultimate strategy of the institutes is to be ready when the demands for truth exceed the supply.

The meeting also provided opportunities to discuss:

  • how to get new organizations off the ground with limited expense (e.g., by reprinting existing research by a different institute while doing PR to connect the research to newsworthy local issues);

  • how to resist the temptations of funding that may distract from more important priorities, and the dangers of being housed within a university that might infringe on the independence of a young organization;

  • how to structure a governing board and advisory bodies to accelerate organizational progress;

  • how to assess impact even when the only measures are indirect; among other important topics.

There are many nuggets of wisdom within the original notes from this meeting, which still lives on the Atlas Network website. You can access a PDF of the original publication right here.

Where We Are Today

Of course, if you choose to review this PDF of Dorian’s notes from the first Atlas Network workshop, you’ll be struck also by how much the world has changed. There is a big focus on books. Not so much on TikTok videos!

Back in 2020, I wrote a short monograph on The Freedom Movement: Its Past, Present, and Future, which might be a good complement to the 1983 manual for understanding the evolution in our market.

It is notable, however, that this first workshop shows an early appreciation of how technology could change think tanks’ business models for the better. As a small example, Greg Lindsay of Centre for Independent Studies in Australia spoke about how “fundraising by mail” had not seemed cost-effective until the organization invested in a “word processor” that allowed outreach at scale.

There’s some irony in the fact that, as I write this reflection on the first Atlas Network event of 40 years ago, we just finished up another one—a Radical Innovation Summit that we co-organized with the new Universidad de la Libertad in Mexico City. The focus here was on decentralized technologies that can let normal people circumvent parasitical government bureaucracies.

One of the presenters on the second day of the conference in Mexico City reminded us that the great economist F.A. Hayek seemed to anticipate the invention of Bitcoin back in 1984:

“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop.”

Today, there are many people working on “sly roundabout ways” to deliver results that remain elusive in much of the world: rising living standards, equality before law, and the sense of meaning that comes from problem-solving within a community.

I hope that friends of Atlas Network take some optimism from this, and that they stay focused on both learning lessons from the past and leaning into the frontiers of the future.