But as Sinan Ulgen, the head of an Istanbul think tank, points out, Erdogan is more vulnerable than the autocrats of Iran or Russia, who have oil revenues to float them through a crisis.
think tank points out that a basic, 24-hour web site with a dedicated server, including security, costs about $42,000 from a better ISP, compared with self-cost of $100,000-plus 100,000-plus and security stafor
Mr Osborne insists that the figures from think tanks, pointing to losses of more than £1,000 a year for three million people, are misleading because they do not take account of the £7.20 an hour national living wage he will introduce next April and the rise in the personal tax allowance to £10,800 at the same time.
Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, points out that the participation rate has fallen particularly sharply for groups that are often hurt first in a weak economy: since December it is down 0.6 percentage points for blacks and 0.9 percentage points for Latinos.
Sergio M. Marxuach, public policy director at the Center for a New Economy, an independent think tank, pointed to a 10-stop train system built for mass transit that never attracted a mass ridership and never sparked development that had been anticipated around station stops.
A recent report by an independent think tank pointed to the strengths of its organic growth, and warned the government against trying to push its own agenda of effectively shifting new businesses over towards the Olympic park in Stratford once the Games have finished.
As the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, pointed out recently, the soaring pay of bankers and CEOs has driven most of the rise in income inequality in recent decades.
Except for the math part: If you look at actual numbers, it's kind of hard to see the evidence of this boom in any way that matters to humans, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center For Economic And Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank, pointed out.
The think tank's point was not that waiting times had reached the level they were at then, rather that this is the first time in two decades of almost continuous improvement that there has been a sustained drop in performance.
My original suggestion for the title of this series was "How (not) to start a think tank", the point being that I'm no expert when it comes to establishing a new venture, developing a website, fundraising or any of the other things that will be critical for our project.
