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The FP Top 100 Global
Thinkers
Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2012's global marketplace of
ideas and the thinkers who make them.
DECEMBER 2012
1 AUNG SAN SUU KYI, THEIN SEIN
For showing that change can happen anywhere, even in one of the world's most
repressive states.
Member of parliament, president | Burma
In 2012, the hopes for the Arab Spring began fading into cynicism as the world
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AUNG
SAN
SUU
1
THEIN
SEIN
1
MONCEF
MARZOUKI
2
BILL
CLINTON
3
HILLARY
CLINTON
3
SEBASTIAN
THRUN
4
BILL
GATES
5
MELINDA
GATES
5
MALALA
YOUSAFZAI
6
BARACK
OBAMA
7
watched Syria descend into civil war, while the region's nascent democracies
struggled with their newfound freedom. But, meanwhile, one of the most
remarkable and unexpected political reversals of our time has unfolded on the
other side of the globe: Burma, long among the world's most repressive
dictatorships, began to reform under the leadership of two very unlikely allies.
For nearly 20 years, dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was sealed under house arrest
by Burma's paranoid military junta, which had drawn an iron curtain over the
country since 1962. Now she's a duly elected member of the country's
parliament -- and it's partly thanks to reformist President Thein Sein, a former
general often described as an awkward, bookish bureaucrat. To the
astonishment of many, Thein Sein began loosening restrictions on free speech
and opening the economy after coming to power in 2011. This year, as the
United States restored diplomatic ties with Burma (which the junta renamed
Myanmar in 1989) and eased travel and economic sanctions, his government
curbed censorship of the media and freed hundreds of political prisoners.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the soft-spoken, iconic political activist whom devotees call
simply "the Lady," may not seem like an obvious partner for Thein Sein, but
she has become one by doing what few legends of her stature can: embracing
the messy pragmatism of politics. Although Burma's struggles are far from over
-- she has warned that international investment has been too rapid, and
ethnic violence is escalating -- the willingness of both the Lady and the general
to embrace short-term compromise and foster long-term reconciliation in what
was only recently one of the world's most isolated countries is something to
celebrate.
Fittingly, Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept her 1991 Nobel Peace
Prize in June. She used the occasion to remind the world of those like her,
who struggle in the most forlorn places: "To be forgotten too is to die a little. It
is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity." It is a
sentiment still felt from Aleppo to Havana, Pyongyang to Tehran, but also, as
Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein have shown, one that doesn't need to be
permanent.
2 MONCEF MARZOUKI
For keeping the ideas of the Arab Spring alive.
President | Tunisia
As the spirit of 2011 has faded this year amid religious violence in Egypt and
Libya and the bloody sectarian civil war in Syria, Tunisia remains the Arab
Spring's most promising success story, with a contentious but robust political
system and an economy that is growing again.
Much of the credit goes to President Moncef Marzouki, who has provided
vision and wisdom since taking office in December 2011. At the U.N. General
Assembly meeting in September, the doctor-turned-democracy-activist called
on the United Nations to declare dictatorship a "disease" and launch an official
campaign against autocratic rulers, including the establishment of an
international court to arbitrate elections and government legitimacy so as to
prevent dictators from taking power in the first place. "It behooves us to
implement an ambitious, bold program to eliminate dictatorship in the same
way in which we got rid of polio and smallpox," Marzouki said.
But Marzouki, a former professor of public health, is no starry-eyed idealist. An
admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, he devoted himself to human rights early in his
career, traveling to India in his youth and South Africa soon after the end of
apartheid. As head of Tunisia's leading human rights organization, he was
arrested several times by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's regime and was eventually
forced into exile in France, where he remained a prominent figure in Tunisia's
liberal opposition but angered many of his cohorts by working with the Islamist
Ennahda movement. Marzouki returned home after Ben Ali's ouster and was
elected president by the country's Constituent Assembly.
A committed secularist, Marzouki, who is overseeing the writing of a new
constitution, insists that Islamist parties must play a role in Tunisia's
governance, though he has also been willing to stand up to them when they
overreach. He describes the country's ultra-conservative Salafi groups as
"extremely dangerous" but outside the mainstream. If anyone can guide
Tunisia through its transition to democracy -- and hopefully create a model for
a troubled region -- it's Marzouki, who just might have the right combination of
tenacity and levelheadedness to see the country through.
Reading list:
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared
Diamond; Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass
Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About
Our Future, by Peter D. Ward; anthology of haikus.
Best idea heard in 2012:
Tax financial transactions.
Worst idea:
The support of China, Russia, and Iran to the Syrian regime.
American decline or American renewal?
Renewal.
More Europe or less?
More.
To tweet or not to tweet?
Not to tweet.

3 BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON
For still thinking about tomorrow.
Former president | New York
Secretary of state | Washington
Love them or hate them, America's ultimate power couple are also its most
effective advocates for liberal internationalism: a vision that government can
build prosperity at home and promote democracy and development abroad
without demonizing the successful or needlessly antagonizing other countries.
It's a different kind of American exceptionalism, based on more than just
firepower. And in a U.S. election year that often felt like Randian revanchism
vs. opportunistic populism on economics and chest-thumping aggression vs.
coldhearted realism on foreign policy, it's no wonder that America is in the
grips of a serious case of Clinton nostalgia.
In an ironic twist, Hillary Clinton -- once seen as the calculating cynic to Barack
Obama's idealistic optimist -- has emerged as one of the Obama
administration's most forceful advocates for human rights and democracy.
Clinton, who was among those who led the push for the United States to
intervene in Libya last year, remains a relentless campaigner for women's
rights and economic development, and she has insisted on the promotion of
rights for gays and lesbians as an official component of U.S. diplomacy for the
first time. But she has also added hardheaded global tactician to her portfolio,
as when she spearheaded tense negotiations in China this past spring for
the release of dissident Chen Guangcheng (No. 9). With a 66 percent approval
rating, she's a lot more popular than her boss these days and has taken the ups
and downs of the Arab Spring -- which she accurately predicted at a time when
many others succumbed to starry-eyed wishful thinking -- as proof that her
brand of pragmatic politics harnessed to global star power can be a recipe for
American restoration.
As for Bill Clinton, he silenced the doubters at the Democratic National
Convention with an impassioned speech on Obama's behalf that had many
pining for the salad years of the 1990s. Forty-eight minutes long and heavy on
statistics and his trademark folksy ad-libs as he made the case for economic
revitalization, the speech proved once again that no one in American politics
does a better job of "'splainin' stuff" to the public. He's still willing to criticize
the president, for example, questioning Obama's assaults on opponent Mitt
Romney's business success. And fittingly, Clinton's signature post-presidency
achievement, the Clinton Global Initiative, is dedicated to the notion that
bringing the world's most powerful and successful people together to work on
pressing global problems is more productive than attacking those people. He
has been busy on his own innovative projects as well, touring Africa to promote
sustainable agriculture and Haiti to discuss alternative energy, periodically
dispensing his homespun wisdom along the way. "We have a saying in
Arkansas," he told a group of baffled nurses in Kigali, Rwanda. "If you find a
turtle on a fence post, he didn't get there by accident."
After four years and a record 112 countries visited (as of writing), Hillary will
soon step down as secretary of state. Despite her stated plans to retire from
politics as a grandmother-in-waiting, many supporters still haven't given up
hope that the Clintons will once again be in the White House come 2016. Only
this time, Bill may be the one at home baking cookies.
4 SEBASTIAN THRUN
For revving up the robot-car revolution.
Computer scientist | Palo Alto, Calif.
Not since Henry Ford's Model T brought driving to the American masses at the
turn of the 20th century has a motor vehicle so promised to revolutionize
global transportation. Hydrogen and electric cars once seemed poised to fill
that void, but their costs and upkeep have proved prohibitive. Enter the
driverless car, the brainchild of Google fellow and Stanford University
computer scientist Sebastian Thrun -- and now street-legal.
How radical is it? Thrun has in effect reimagined the future of cars -- as more
about software than hardware. Relying on high-powered sensors and artificial-
intelligence software that mimics human decisions, Thrun's cars can maneuver
on and off highways and through rush-hour traffic all by themselves. (One
even made it up San Francisco's famously winding Lombard Street.) The
self-driving cars' growing legion of advocates says the vehicles could completely
overhaul the way we think about transportation, making it more efficient,
cheaper, greener, and safer. "This is an opportunity to fix a really colossal, big
problem for society," the German-born Thrun says. Robot drivers don't drink,
get distracted, or fall asleep behind the wheel -- and their reflexes are measured
in milliseconds. Thrun thinks the cars could halve the number of annual road
deaths, now at more than 1.2 million worldwide. And because the safer
driverless vehicles could be built smaller and lighter, they could also radically
reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions.
The journey toward a self-driving vehicle began back when Thrun and his team
of Stanford researchers spent a year in the California desert designing the
Stanley robot car to compete in a 2005 Pentagon road race aimed at
sparking innovation. Stanley took home the $2 million prize after successfully
traveling 131 miles across the Mojave Desert.
Today, the driverless cars of 2012 are hitting the streets. In August, Google's
fleet of experimental cars logged its 300,000th mile on public roads. That
followed Nevada's move in March to issue the first license for a self-driving
car. As of September, Google's version of Stanley was also cleared to drive in
California, the most populous U.S. state and one that historically sets the
standard for how cars are built worldwide. Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors,
Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Volvo are all designing or testing self-driving
vehicles now.
Plenty of technical hurdles remain -- not to mention the need to update
current traffic laws that assume a human driver -- before the cars are produced
for a mass market. Still, it's no longer a stretch to imagine that someday soon, if
you're driving on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco, you just
might see Thrun finally starting to relax behind the wheel of his robo-powered
Prius.
Reading list:
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.
Best idea:
New approach to desalinization of seawater.
Worst idea:
Cutting taxes for the rich helps poor people.
Renewal.
More.
Absolutely.

5 BILL AND MELINDA GATES
Co-chairs, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation | Seattle
MELINDA GATES
For insisting on women's power to choose.
As a leader of the world's largest private development organization, Melinda
Gates has long impressed development hands by tackling extreme poverty,
pioneering vaccinations, and waging a bold campaign with her husband to
eradicate polio. Now she's establishing herself as a powerful force in her own
right, taking on the Catholic Church for its conservative resistance to
contraception. By 2020, she says, the Gates Foundation will make "affordable,
lifesaving contraceptive information, services, and supplies" available to 120
million women in the world's poorest countries. According to Gates
Foundation-funded research, increasing access to contraception could save
the lives of more than 100,000 women each year, slashing maternal mortality
by nearly one-third.
Gates, a practicing Catholic, firmly disagrees with the Vatican's longstanding
opposition to contraception and argues that improving access to it is vitally
important for public health -- and she has personally and more or less single-
handedly vowed to "get this back on the global agenda."
"This will be my life's work," she told the Guardian in July. And she has the
funds to do it: By 2020, she announced this year, the Gates Foundation will
invest $560 million in improving access to birth control, and it plans to raise
roughly $4 billion from outside donors. Most will be spent in South Asia
and sub-Saharan Africa, where access to contraceptives is not widespread
and maternal and infant mortality rates are devastatingly high. Contraceptive
use already prevents 272,000 maternal deaths per year, but millions of
women around the world still lack access to modern family planning --
precisely the void Gates has taken bold steps to fill.
Reading list:
In the Shadow of the Banyan, by Vaddey Ratner; A Good Man:
Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver, by Mark Shriver;
The Last Hunger Season, by Roger Thurow.
Best idea:
Three Tanzanian women who innovated an unbreakable security
system for their group mobile money account.
Worst idea:
Women in the developing world not being empowered to determine if
and when to have a child.
American renewal because of the human promise, innovation, and
opportunity that exists in our country.
More Europe, they continue to be leaders in global development aid.
To tweet and join the global conversation.
BILL GATES
For daring to imagine a better everything.
A perennial FP Global Thinker for the enormous scale and ambition of his
efforts to finance -- and reimagine -- global health and development, Bill Gates
earns a mention this year for investing in toilets. Don't snicker. It's an
urgently worthy cause: 2.5 billion people -- or nearly 40 percent of the world's
population -- lack proper bathroom sanitation, leading to the spread of
diarrheal diseases that claim the lives of 1.5 million children each year.
To combat it, his Gates Foundation has invested nearly $150 million in
programs that improve global sanitation, hosting an engineering competition to
develop a "super-toilet" that's inexpensive to build and maintain and that
doesn't require a water or sewage system. It's a simple concept but one that
Gates, the man whose innovations helped transform personal computing
software, says will "revolutionize" sanitation in the developing world as well
as in wealthy countries. The winning design, from the California Institute of
Technology, uses a solar-powered electrochemical reactor that kills off
microorganisms while producing hydrogen and electricity. The foundation
hopes to make a pilot version of the system operational by 2014.
Of course, sanitation is just one sideline for Gates. Late last year he became the
first private citizen to address a G-20 summit, giving a speech on the future of
development that cemented his move from "businessman to statesman," as the
Guardian put it. With much of the world looking inward to fix economic
messes at home, Gates is filling the development void abroad -- from
spearheading an ambitious effort to eradicate polio by 2018, with the
foundation giving $150 million to the cause annually, to ramping up his push
for food security, including committing $2 billion toward fighting hunger over
the next five years. Meanwhile, Gates and Warren Buffett (No. 42), who has
committed to giving much of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, persuaded 11
more billionaires to join their two-year-old "Giving Pledge," bringing the tally
to an astonishing 92 families who will donate half their wealth to
philanthropic causes before they die.
6 MALALA YOUSAFZAI
For standing up to the Taliban, and everything they represent.
Student | Pakistan
The Taliban's most fearsome enemy in Pakistan isn't U.S. drones or the
military's tanks: It's a 15-year-old schoolgirl. Malala Yousafzai's tool of
defiance? Her own bravery in speaking out for the simple idea that girls should
have access to the same education as boys. That shouldn't be a radical notion in
2012, but even as Pakistan bristles with roughly 100 nuclear warheads, up to
60 percent of women are still illiterate and two out of every five girls fail to
finish primary school. Challenging the tyranny of those low expectations can
get you killed in today's Pakistan.
In October, as Malala headed home after an exam, a Taliban gunman stopped
her school bus and announced that she must be punished for insulting "the
soldiers of Allah." Then he shot her in the head.
Malala, who was grievously wounded but miraculously survived, has fit a
lifetime of activism into her few short years. When Islamist militants overran
Malala's native Swat Valley in 2009, banning girls' education, she penned an
anonymous blog for the BBC about the daily horrors of life under Taliban rule.
"My five-year-old brother was playing on the lawn. When my father asked him
what he was playing, he replied 'I am making a grave,'" she wrote in one entry.
The journal offered a ground-level view of the creeping totalitarianism in
Pakistan -- and some soon compared it to Anne Frank's Diary of a Young
Girl, but set in modern-day Swat Valley.
Armed only with her convictions and the firm support of her father, who runs a
private girls' school, Malala refused to be silenced. She became a celebrity in
Pakistan through her outspoken interviews, chaired a "child assembly" that
aimed to expand opportunities for youth in the Swat Valley, and pleaded with
late U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke to help halt the Talibanization of her
country. "I shall raise my voice," she said last year. "If I didn't do it, who
would?"
It's a lesson in courage that is inspiring others to stand up to the forces of
barbarism in their midst. Too bad it took a tragedy to do it.
7 BARACK OBAMA
For redrawing America's global footprint.
President | Washington
The brainy 44th president is a huge basketball fan, but Barack Obama knows
that none of the plays he calls from the Oval Office are slam dunks. "Nothing
comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," he said in an interview this year.
"Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance
that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the
way you made the decision."
At home, Obama has done far more to lift the faltering U.S. economy out of the
doldrums than his critics will acknowledge, while expanding the social safety
net and daring to take on the greatest threat to America's fiscal well-being: the
country's exploding health-care costs. Abroad, he has curbed his predecessor's
dangerous excesses, though that doesn't mean retreating from the world. As he
never ceased reminding us on the campaign trail, Osama bin Laden is dead;
killer drones aggressively patrol the skies over Pakistan and elsewhere in
search of al Qaeda targets; and Obama's decision to lead (from behind!) an
international coalition against Libyan despot Muammar al-Qaddafi created the
strange paradox of an avowedly pro-American Arab country awash in armed
militias.
But Obama, ever the cautious realist, has been a careful steward of American
power. This year has seen the pullout of tens of thousands of U.S. troops from
Afghanistan, the theater of America's longest war. The president has also been
wary of getting entangled in the even bloodier sectarian conflict in Syria,
refusing to contemplate a Libya-style intervention, and he has wisely adopted a
low-key approach to Egypt as it struggles to preserve its newly won democratic
freedoms amid an Islamist resurgence.
Whoever sits in the Oval Office in the years ahead will find it hard to break away
from Obama's more restrained view of America's role in the world -- especially
now that he has four more years to follow through on his promise to end the
wars of the post-9/11 decade.With the president's determination to "chip
away" at global problems and make America's allies part of the solution, he
has conclusively put cowboy diplomacy out to pasture.
8 PAUL RYAN
For doubling down on the debt crisis.
Congressman | Washington
Repeal Obamacare. Lower income tax rates and simplify the tax code. Cut
Medicaid by a third and make it a state-controlled block-grant program.
Overhaul Medicare by giving beneficiaries money to buy competing public and
private health plans. Reduce non-entitlement spending to its lowest level since
World War II. And save $5 trillion in the process.
These are the bold ideas contained in Paul Ryan's austere budget proposal,
which the congressman from Wisconsin has gradually persuaded Republican
thought leaders, lawmakers, and presidential candidates to support in an effort
to shed the reputation for fiscal profligacy that the Republican Party earned
under President George W. Bush. "To find a parallel to the way Ryan has so
thoroughly seized control of the Republican agenda and identity, you have to
go back at least to Gingrich in his nineties heyday, or possibly to Reagan," New
York magazine marveled last spring.
In the 2012 presidential election, contender Mitt Romney didn't just champion
Ryan's ideas -- he tapped the 42-year-old libertarian-leaning lawmaker as his
running mate, catapulting the debate over the size and scope of the U.S.
government to the top of the political agenda. "The choice is whether to put
hard limits on economic growth or hard limits on the size of government, and
we choose to limit government," Ryan declared during his speech at the
Republican National Convention, where organizers prominently displayed
a humming national debt clock.
Ryan's anti-deficit jihad has global implications too. He has embodied his
party's internal struggle over defense spending, voting for automatic defense
cuts to trim the deficit while opposing reductions in military spending. "Letting
budgetary concerns drive national-security strategy means choosing decline,"
Ryan declared in his budget, proposing cuts that would effectively slash
funding to entities such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and
the State Department -- but not the military -- by nearly $5 billion. We may not
see Ryan's dramatic ideas enacted now that his ticket has lost the election. But
they might very well prove prescient.
9 CHEN GUANGCHENG
For envisioning a China with the rule of law.
Legal activist | New York
A year ago, Chen Guangcheng was living under house arrest in the small
Chinese village of Dongshigu, unable to travel or receive visitors and subject to
constant harassment by the local authorities. Today, he is a global human
rights icon, living with his family in New York's Greenwich Village and free to
study and go where he pleases -- though uncertain about whether he will ever
be allowed to return to his homeland.
Chen, a self-taught lawyer who has been blind since early childhood, first came
to prominence in 2005, when he brought a class-action lawsuit alleging that
local authorities had forced women in his region to undergo forced abortions
and sterilizations as part of their adherence to China's one-child policy. He was
imprisoned for four years for his temerity and then detained in his home,
where he faced regular physical abuse. As his fame grew within China, futile
attempts to break past the phalanx of guards near his house became a popular
method of protest. He soon was adopted as an international cause clbre, with
everyone from U.S. Rep. Chris Smith to actor Christian Bale seeking to visit.
Chen shocked the world in April when he made a daring, next-to-impossible
escape, climbing over the wall surrounding his house (breaking his foot in the
process) and catching a ride some 350 miles to Beijing, where he took refuge in
the U.S. Embassy. After a tense, days-long diplomatic standoff closely
involving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (No. 3), a deal was struck under
which Chen would be allowed to travel to the United States to study. Now at
New York University, Chen has embraced his new role as an evangelist for
human rights, making the case that incremental change -- one village or even
one person at a time -- can eventually transform a superpower. Against all
odds, he remains optimistic, believing that China, taking a cue from Japan and
South Korea, must "learn Eastern democracy." He even thinks it's
inevitable: "Nobody can stop the progress of history," he says.
Best idea:
The determination of China's common people. This is the hope of
China's future.
Worst idea:
Violence.
This depends on whether the good nature of common people can be
given expression in government policies, including foreign policy.

10 DAVID BLANKENHORN, NARAYANA KOCHERLAKOTA, RICHARD
A. MULLER
For changing their minds.
Activist, economist, physicist | New York, Minneapolis, Berkeley, Calif.
Flip-flopping gets a bad rap. Yes, it can be depressing to hear politicians
cynically reverse strongly held positions from one election cycle to another.
Sometimes, however, when a particularly forceful and articulate voice in a
policy debate switches sides, it can be the most effective way to shift the entire
conversation.
David Blankenhorn may not have been the most high-profile gay marriage
opponent to have had a change of heart this year -- that was President Barack
Obama -- but he was definitely the most surprising. The founder of the
conservative Institute for American Values wrote The Future of
Marriage, a 2007 book offering intellectual cover to those arguing that same-
sex marriage threatens to undermine the institution of the family. He also
served as an expert witness in court defending California's Proposition 8, which
legally defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. This year,
however, swayed by the growing support for same-sex marriage, Blankenhorn
did a full 180, putting his heresy on display in the New York Times in June.
"Whatever one's definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian
couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness," he wrote, prompting
an enraged reaction from his former allies.
Monetary policy may not provoke the same visceral emotions as the marriage
debate, but it was no less shocking in the economics world when Narayana
Kocherlakota, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank's president, said publicly
in September that the Federal Reserve should hold interest rates near zero
until unemployment falls below 5.5 percent. Kocherlakota, a lifelong inflation
hawk, had been one of the most outspoken opponents of lowering rates and
had voted against doing so in 2011. Why did he switch? Facts on the ground,
namely little real threat of inflation and the need for jobs, jobs, jobs (in Fed
speak: "By increasing monetary accommodation," he said, "the committee can
better meet its employment mandate while still satisfying its price-stability
mandate.") The turnabout was in line with a major shift by the Federal Reserve
and its chairman, Ben Bernanke (No. 15), resulting in the new growth-targeted
monetary policy known as quantitative easing. Time will tell whether this will
kick-start America's job market or lead to out-of-control inflation.
A closer look at the numbers also changed the mind of Richard A. Muller, a
University of California/Berkeley physicist and author of popular science books
like Physics for Future Presidents, who had long been the go-to climate-
change skeptic for those unsatisfied with sneering Drudge headlines. For years,
he argued that widely used climate-change models were flawed because
thermometers around the world had been placed too near the pavement and
scientists were manipulating the temperature data they used. So Muller, along
with his daughter, embarked on his own effort -- the Berkeley Earth
Surface Temperature project -- which automated data analysis to eliminate
human bias. Given that they were partly funded by conservative billionaire
Charles Koch, who also bankrolls the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute,
Muller's numbers were widely expected to "disprove" global warming. But
instead, he had an epiphany: "Call me a converted skeptic," he wrote, saying
that "prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct" and "humans are
almost entirely the cause."
As these three thinkers prove, it's never too late to change your mind.
MULLER
Reading list:
The Social Animal, by David Brooks; Uncommon Sense, by Alan
Cromer; Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.
Best idea:
Clean fracking (producing shale gas in an environmentally acceptable
way).
Worst idea:
Shut down conventional energy (Japanese nuclear, Gulf oil).
Renewal is possible, but it requires more sensible policies in the three
Es: energy, education, and economics. We need less politicization and
more objectivity.
Europe is about the right size. Maybe it should add Turkey and
Morocco.
Twhat?
11 JAMES HANSEN
For sounding the alarm on climate change, early and often.
Director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies | New York
"Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening," James Hansen wrote in a
New York Times op-ed this year. Using his stature as NASA's top climate
scientist, Hansen has arguably done as much as anyone to sound this alarm,
forcefully and unequivocally arguing that climate change is the work of
humans long before other scientists were willing to say so. A self-described
"reticent Midwestern scientist," he may not look like a radical protest figure,
but when it comes to the climate, Hansen is a latter-day Abbie Hoffman. After
Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc across the Eastern Seaboard in October, an
American public distracted for years by the troubles of the Great Recession
finally seemed to awake to the destructive potential of a changing climate --
which Hansen had been warning of for decades.
Since publishing some of the seminal studies on the effects of greenhouse
gases in 1981, he has steadily ratcheted up the pressure on public officials to
take his dire warnings seriously. Last year, the 71-year-old was even arrested in
front of the White House after imploring President Barack Obama, via
megaphone, to reject the Keystone XL pipline "for the sake of your children
and grandchildren." Nor was it the first time the outspoken scientist has found
himself on the wrong side of the law. He has been censored by NASA,
attacked by conservatives, and denounced by other climate scientists for his
advocacy. But Hansen continues to speak widely about a threat he compares to
a large asteroid headed for the Earth. Just in the last few months, as Arctic sea
ice shrank to its lowest level yet, he published a study finding that as much
as 13 percent of the planet's surface has suffered from extreme heat in recent
summers, up from less than 1 percent before 1980. We doubt Hansen is happy
to see his theories confirmed.
12 ANGELA MERKEL
For refusing to give up on the dream of a united Europe.
Chancellor | Germany
More than half the countries in the European Union have changed leaders
since the region's sovereign debt crisis erupted three years ago, but Angela
Merkel has not only remained in charge -- as the steward of Europe's largest
economy, she has become the continent's chief crisis manager. And Merkel,
long known as "Frau Nein" for opposing efforts to bail out Europe's troubled
south, finally seemed to embrace that leadership role in 2012, prescribing a mix
of austerity measures, structural reforms, and fiscal integration. She has tacked
on mandatory spending cuts to aid packages for Greece, Ireland, and
Portugal and spearheaded a historic EU deficit-reduction treaty. All along,
the much-misunderstood Merkel has insisted on solving the regional crisis
with more Europe, not less.
Yet she has done it by deftly catering to the frugal instincts of her political base.
"We all have to resist the temptation to finance growth with increased debt yet
again," Merkel cautioned in June. A month earlier, France had elected
Franois Hollande, who supports the very solutions -- stimulus spending and
collectivizing eurozone debt -- that Merkel opposes. Caught between
European leaders' renewed focus on growth and domestic opposition to
bailouts for Germany's debt-saddled neighbors, Merkel finally backed a new
European rescue fund and the European Central Bank's plan to buy the debt
of troubled eurozone countries.
What all her moves have in common is a relentless determination to resolve
Europe's gravest crisis since World War II by deepening the continent's
economic and political union, not unwinding it. Inspired to pursue politics by
the fall of the Berlin Wall and EU architect Helmut Kohl, Merkel the onetime
East German physicist often cites German reunification as an object lesson
in Europe's ability to overcome. "Do we dare to be more European?" she asked
this year, advocating for more centralized decision-making on budgets and
taxes. The answer could very well determine whether Merkel will be
remembered as the savior of the European project or the leader who presided
over its demise.
KNOCKED OUT:
15 of the EU's 27 member states have lost leaders thanks in part to the
eurocrisis. The list includes: Ivars Godmanis (Latvia, 2009), Ferenc
Gyurcsany (Hungary, 2009), Mirek Topolanek (Czech Republic,
2009), Gordon Brown (Britain, 2010,) Brian Cowen (Ireland, 2011),
Jose Socrates (Portugal, 2011), Mari Kiviniemi (Finland, 2011), Lars
Lokke Rasmussen (Denmark, 2011), George Papandreou (Greece,
2011), Silvio Berlusconi (Italy, 2011), Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero
(Spain, 2011), Emil Boc (Romania, 2012), Borut Pahor (Slovenia,
2012), Iveta Radicova (Slovakia, 2012), Nicolas Sarkozy (France,
2012).
13 EHUD BARAK, BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
For forcing the world to confront Iran's nuclear program.
Defense minister, prime minister | Israel
Almost single-handedly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Defense Minister Ehud Barak have wrenched the world's attention toward the
apocalyptic potential of a nuclear Iran. "Today a great battle is being waged
between the modern and the medieval," Netanyahu said at the United Nations
in September. "At stake is not merely the future of my country. At stake is the
future of the world."
Barak, once the standard-bearer of the Israeli left and an implacable foe of
Netanyahu, has improbably become Bibi's closest ally in the effort to stop
Tehran from going nuclear. He has played a crucial role in focusing minds on
what he calls the "zone of immunity" -- when Iran's nuclear program is past the
point it can be destroyed by arms. If Israel does decide to strike on its own, it
will be in no small measure due to Barak's framing of a threat that he has
called "a sword on the neck" of the Jewish state.
The effects of a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities remain unknown, but the
result of this rhetorical offensive has been impressive. The two Israelis not only
sparked a political debate at home but also induced Europe to cut off oil
imports from Iran and got U.S. President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney into
a prolonged argument over which presidential hopeful would be a better ally to
the government in Jerusalem. Pretty impressive for a country the size of New
Jersey.
As Netanyahu, at times an open partisan of the Republicans in the U.S.
campaign, pressed Washington to define "red lines" that could provoke military
action, Obama rushed to warn the Islamic Republic that "time is not
unlimited" for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue, in addition to lining
up an international coalition to isolate Iran. Israeli leaders have watched these
moves with grudging appreciation, but they haven't taken their fingers off the
trigger. "We've waited for diplomacy to work. We've waited for sanctions to
work," Netanyahu said recently. "None of us can afford to wait much
longer."

14 MEIR DAGAN, YUVAL DISKIN
For begging to differ.
Former Mossad director, former Shin Bet chief | Israel
If the Israeli government doesn't end up launching a war against Iran, it won't
be because of the persuasive abilities of U.S. President Barack Obama or the
political machinations of Israel's opposition parties. More likely, it will be the
work of calculating former security officials like onetime intelligence chief Meir
Dagan and internal security director Yuval Diskin, who have stepped into the
public arena in unprecedented fashion to make a convincing, hard-nosed case
that a strike would only make the Iranian threat greater.
These former soldiers are no peaceniks: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu once praised Dagan by saying that he went to war not with a knife
but with "a rocket-propelled grenade between his teeth." So when the
legendarily aggressive former spy chief opposes a strike because it "would lead
to a regional war and solve the internal problems of the Islamic Republic,"
Israelis take note.
Diskin has not only criticized a strike on Iran as unworkable, but has also called
into question the capability of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to
make the right decision. Their judgment is clouded by "messianic feelings,"
Diskin has warned -- an accusation that Israel often directs at the mullahs.
These former spymasters are doing their best to help cooler heads prevail,
reminding Israelis that not every problem can be solved by their impressive
military.
15 BEN BERNANKE, SCOTT SUMNER
For keeping the world's largest economy afloat.
Chairman, Federal Reserve | Washington
Economist | Waltham, Mass.
"Professors at Bentley University who've never published a famous book don't
normally shift the public debate," Slate's Matthew Yglesias wrote after the
Federal Reserve announced in September a new round of "quantitative easing,"
stimulating economic growth by buying assets from private banks. But Scott
Sumner's dogged blogging on his website, TheMoneyIllusion, has won rare
bipartisan plaudits across the economics world, ranging from Goldman Sachs
to Paul Krugman (No. 34) -- and Sumner just might have permanently shifted
U.S. monetary policy.
His big idea is nominal GDP targeting, the notion that the Fed's policies should
be focused on economic growth rather than inflation rates. As Sumner
explains, "it's about setting specific goals and promising to do whatever one
can to meet those goals." This means the Fed should keep up aggressive easing
and inject money into the financial system until growth returns -- inflation be
damned.
The most important convert to Sumner's ideas was Fed Chairman Ben
Bernanke himself. As recently as November 2011, he dismissed the notion that
the Fed should reorient its policies from inflation to growth targets. Over time,
however, Bernanke reportedly came to realize that the U.S. jobs crisis was more
severe than he realized and needed some unorthodox thinking. And he
managed to bring his hawkish board around: On Sept. 13, the Fed announced
that it would buy $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities and
continue doing so until the U.S. job market improved, and never mind about
inflation. "This is a 'Main Street' policy," Bernanke said. "What we're about
here is trying to get jobs going."
Influential economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, one of Sumner's earliest
champions, proclaimed it "Scott Sumner day."
SUMNER
Reading list:
The Great Recession, by Robert L. Hetzel; 1Q84, by Haruki
Murakami; The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart.
Best idea:
Develop self-driving cars.
Worst idea:
For the eurozone to double down with a fiscal union.
Decline in the short run.
More money, less Europe.
Not.
When was the last time a rock band changed the world? The Russian punk
collective known as Pussy Riot captured global attention this year after three of
the group's members were sentenced to jail for the "punk prayer" they staged
at a Moscow cathedral, earning the support of everyone from Madonna and the
Red Hot Chili Peppers to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the U.S.
State Department, and becoming the unlikely international symbols of Russia's
re-energized opposition to an increasingly autocratic Vladimir Putin.
But the three members of the band arrested for the stunt -- Maria Alyokhina
and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who were sent to remote prison camps for two-
year sentences, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was released -- are more
than just slam-dancing "hooligans," as the authorities describe them. Just read
the powerful closing statements at their closely watched trial -- a ringing
manifesto that puts them squarely in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Vaclav Havel.
In a sense, the band argued, it had already won its case by drawing an almost
comical overreaction to an act that would have been treated as a minor
infraction almost anywhere else. By using its own trial as a platform to indict
the system as a whole, Pussy Riot did something more profound, exposing
Putin's "sovereign democracy" as "an organism sick to the core." As Alyokhina
put it, "The sickness explodes out into the open when you rub up against its
inflamed abscesses."
Tolokonnikova concluded with a speech citing Dostoyevsky, Socrates, and the
Bible, laying out a mission statement for the project. "People can sense the
truth. Truth really does have some kind of ontological, existential superiority
over lies," she said. "It is not three singers from Pussy Riot who are on trial
here," she declared. "It is the entire state system of the Russian Federation."
Tolokonnikova then quoted a line from one of the band's songs -- "Open all
the doors, tear off your epaulets/Come, taste freedom with us" -- just before
being led off to jail. What could be more punk than that?
17 ABRAHAM KAREM, WILLIAM MCRAVEN
For leading the drone revolution.
Aeronautical engineer | Lake Forest, Calif.
Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command | Tampa, Fla.
If Adm. William McRaven has turned hunting terrorists into an art form,
Abraham Karem is the man who provided him with the paintbrush. It has been
three decades since Karem, a former Israeli Air Force engineer, retreated to his
garage to construct something the Pentagon did not then consider possible --
an unmanned drone that would reliably stay aloft for hours on end. The
ultimate result of the project was the Predator drone, which has emerged as the
defining weapon of the post-9/11 era.
McRaven, who oversees some of the most elite U.S. fighting forces at Special
Operations Command, has spent a lifetime studying special operations and has
formulated a blueprint for what makes them successful. He emphasizes
the need for speed in commando assaults and extensive planning that relies on
precise intelligence, which is where drones come in. In the operation that
earned McRaven a spot in the history books -- the killing of Osama bin Laden
in Pakistan last year -- drones provided vital intelligence for months on the
compound where the al Qaeda chief was staying. The raid presented a
compelling vision for the 21st-century U.S. military: fast, networked, and
deadly. But though the modern-day warrior has tools at his disposal that his
ancestors could only dream of, McRaven doesn't discount the old-fashioned
virtue of a soldier's dedication to the mission. "In an age of high technology and
Jedi Knights we often overlook the need for personal involvement, but we do
so at our own risk," he has written.
While McRaven is busy revolutionizing warfare and the drones are buzzing
over faraway lands such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen -- killing well
over 1,000 people in countries with which the United States has not been at
war during Barack Obama's presidency -- Karem, now 75, is hard at work
designing the next generation of aviation technology. His current project: a
Boeing 737-size plane capable of taking off and landing like a helicopter. A pipe
dream? "I never fail," he retorts.
KAREM
Reading list:
East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, by Susan
Butler; Einstein, by Walter Isaacson; Stalin, by Dmitri Volkogonov.
Best idea:
Capital gains tax on a sliding scale (90 percent on assets held less than
six months, 10 percent on assets held 10 years).
Worst idea:
Acceptance of unlimited growth of political campaign financing
without transparency of contributors.
Both very feasible.
Europe has the same economic problems as the U.S., except they are
more complex and more difficult to solve.
I didn't start. But it is an unstoppable next step for human contact
through computer networks.
18 AHLEM BELHADJ
For demanding that women have a say in the new Arab world.
President, Tunisian Association of Democratic Women | Tunisia
The Arab Spring might have brought newfound freedoms to the Middle East,
but it also saw a wave of Islamists rise to power intent on restricting the
liberties of women. Tunisian feminist Ahlem Belhadj has fought back -- and
proved in the process that liberals will not remain silent as Islamist forces
attempt to hijack the revolution for their own ends.
Belhadj's Tunisian Association of Democratic Women has led the
charge against Islamist attempts to bring back archaic practices such as
polygamy and female circumcision, which were banned under the previous
regime. But unfortunately, the 47-year-old child psychiatrist has her work cut
out for her. This summer, Islamists pushed through a clause in the draft
constitution that declared women "complementary" to men. In response,
Belhadj helped organize a thousands-strong demonstration in the streets of
Tunis to protest what women saw as an open assault on their rights. The clause
was soon reworded, but Belhadj sees more subtle dangers on the horizon.
"Parents are exercising greater moral pressure on young girls to wear the veil,"
she worries. "And feminists are the victims of intimidation: They are attacked
on the streets [and] insulted during sermons in mosques." Belhadj has also
taken her battle to the courts, where she helped represent a woman who was
questioned about whether she was guilty of "indecency" after allegedly being
raped by two policemen.
The battle to expand women's rights is being fought not only in Tunisia but
across the Arab world, where only one-fourth of women are part of the labor
force, polygamy and arranged marriages are all too common, and there is not a
single country where women's political voice is equal to that of men. To
Belhadj, these battles are inseparable from the Arab world's larger struggle for
freedom. "As feminists, we are more vigilant than ever in the face of these
reversals," she says. "It is out of the question to see the result of 50 years of
struggle go up in smoke."
How Bad Is It?
More than 90 percent of women ever married in Egypt have been
subjected to genital mutilation; 80 percent report experiencing sexual
harassment.
In Yemen, 52 percent of girls are married before age 18, and 53
percent of women are illiterate.
An estimated 20 percent of women in Iraq and at least 35 percent in
Lebanon are victims of domestic violence.
In both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, there is not a single woman in
parliament and not a single female minister.
19 RIMA DALI, BASSEL KHARTABIL
For insisting, against all odds, on a peaceful Syrian revolution.
Activists | Syria
With Syria mired in sectarian mayhem, a few brave souls still stand as a
testament to the possibilities -- and the extraordinary costs -- of nonviolent
revolution. When dictator Bashar al-Assad's artillery laid waste to entire
neighborhoods this spring, Rima Dali, a volunteer for the Syrian Arab Red
Crescent, strode alone into a busy Damascus street with a sign bearing a
simple message: "Stop the killing. We want to build a country for all Syrians."
She repeated her act of silent defiance the next week, and even more
onlookers gathered to cheer her on -- a sign that the spirit of peaceful protest
that sparked Syria's uprising in early 2011 endures even after a bloody year and
a half of civil war. Dali, a 33-year-old law school graduate, was arrested for her
activism, but she has refused to be cowed, either by the Assad regime's
intimidation or by the spread of extremism within the ranks of the armed
rebellion. "We look for hope, day in, day out," she said after her release from
jail.
Not all those who have publicly defied Assad have been so fortunate. Bassel
Khartabil is, or was, a young computer engineer living in Damascus whose
innovative programming skills helped integrate Syria into the online
community -- fostering an open-source community in a country long on the
margins of the Internets youth culture. He was hauled off by Assad's security
forces in March, and despite a "#FREEBASSEL" campaign launched by his
friends, he has not been heard from since. "The people who are in real danger
never leave their countries," he tweeted weeks before his arrest. "They are in
danger for a reason and for that they don't leave."
DALI
Reading list:
Le Drglement du Monde, by Amin Maalouf; Dictionary of
Nonviolence, by Jean-Marie Muller; Positive Approaches to
Peacebuilding, edited by Cynthia Sampson, Mohammed Abu-
Nimer, Claudia Liebler, and Diana Whitney.
Best idea:
"The means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek." --Martin
Luther King Jr.
Worst idea:
"Al-Assad or we burn the country down." --shabiha slogan
American renewal.
More.
To tweet.
20 MARIO DRAGHI
For saving Europe when the politicians couldn't (or wouldn't).
President, European Central Bank | Germany
When Mario Draghi, head of Italy's central bank, was mooted to succeed Jean-
Claude Trichet as European Central Bank (ECB) president in 2011, two factors
held him back: his stint at Goldman Sachs -- a firm that had helped Greece
disguise its debt -- and his nationality. "For Italians, inflation is a way of life,
like tomato sauce with pasta!" the German tabloid Bild groused. But "Super
Mario" eventually prevailed over his critics (even Bild later conceded, "He's
actually pretty German"), and he has since embarked on an aggressive effort to
resolve Europe's three-year-old sovereign debt crisis. In the process, he has
liberally interpreted the ECB's mandate to control inflation and, just maybe,
has established himself as the savior of the European project.
Draghi's boldest move came in September, when he announced that the ECB
would buy the bonds of debt-saddled eurozone countries such as Italy and
Spain in an effort to bring down their borrowing costs and reassure investors.
(A flood of headlines like "Mario Draghi May Become the Man Who Saved
Europe -- and the World" followed.) But perhaps it was his vow to do
"whatever it takes to preserve the euro" that finally cooled the fever. Draghi's
bold moves have helped him win over markets, bankers, and politicians,
though nearly one in two Germans mistrusted him on the eve of the bond-
buying announcement. After introducing the measure, Draghi offered to allay
Germans' concerns by defending his monetary policies before the German
parliament. Why volunteer to enter the lion's den? After months of pitched
battle with the bond markets, perhaps the Bundestag didn't seem so daunting.
21 GEORGE SOROS
For telling Europe the ugly truth.
Philanthropist, investor | New York
As Europe's crisis rages on, don't expect reassurance about the future of global
capitalism from this Hungarian-born hedge fund billionaire and market guru.
At a June speech in Italy, George Soros argued that the financial crisis
represents a failure of economic theory "more profound than generally
recognized" and decried the austerity-promoting policies of European
governments, arguing that they "cannot reduce the debt burden by shrinking
the economy."
Soros has been particularly withering in his assessment of German Chancellor
Angela Merkel's (No. 12) response to the crisis. In a widely discussed New
York Review of Books essay in September, he made the case that penny-wise,
pound-foolish Germany, not Greece, is the country most at fault in the crisis.
Germany must either lead Europe out of the crisis or leave the eurozone, he
argued, which would limit the fallout of the crisis and allow smaller countries to
return to growth with a devalued currency. Shortly thereafter, Merkel reversed
course and supported the European Central Bank's plan to buy Spanish and
Italian bonds -- so perhaps Berlin was listening.
Soros, often the object of conspiracy theories for his support for liberal groups
in the United States, dialed it back a little this election year -- even going so far
as to say that there "isn't all that much difference" between President Barack
Obama and contender Mitt Romney. An investor as shrewd as Soros knows it's
always wise to hedge.
22 JOYCE BANDA
For stepping in -- and up -- to fix a broken country.
President | Malawi
When Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika died of a heart attack in April, it
wasn't immediately clear what would become of his vice president, Joyce
Banda. The two had fallen out in recent years, with the increasingly autocratic
president booting Banda from his political party in 2010. Even Mutharika's wife
publicly derided the smalltown veep -- a longtime grassroots advocate for
women, children, and the poor -- scoffing, "She will never be president. How
can a mandazi [fritter] seller be president?" After a tense two days in the wake
of Mutharika's death, however, Banda proved the first lady wrong, becoming
Africa's second-ever female president.
Governing Malawi -- where an estimated 75 percent of its more than 15 million
residents live on $1 or less a day -- presents enormous challenges, to be sure.
But in just seven months Banda has largely thrown out her predecessor's
playbook, showing the world how to take charge and work to turn around a
troubled country. Within days of taking office, she dismissed key members of
Mutharika's administration, including the police chief in power when 19
Malawian demonstrators were killed at a 2011 opposition rally, and in May,
amid rising persecution of gays in Africa, she vowed to repeal Malawi's laws
against homosexuality. By devaluing the Malawian currency by more than a
third, a move Mutharika had long refused despite the IMF's urging, Banda also
secured a much-needed $157 million IMF loan in June -- a first step toward
rebuilding Malawi's debilitated economy.
Her work is cut out for her. So far, however, all signs suggest Banda could
become a new model for African leadership -- shedding the strongman
syndrome and getting down to business to help the poor. To prove it, she has
cut her own salary by 30 percent and put her predecessor's $12 million
presidential jet and most of his fleet of 60 luxury cars up for sale. "I can as well
use private airlines," she said. "I am already used to hitchhiking." But it's more
than that: "I must demonstrate to Malawians that we are in this together," she
explained to Al Jazeera. "I must be the first person to set an example." For
Malawi, and the world over.
23 ED MORSE
For proving that energy independence is no fantasy.
Economist | New York
In March, Ed Morse and several Citigroup colleagues published a 92-page
report with a provocative thesis upending the conventional wisdom on global
energy scarcity. North America, they said, is hurtling toward energy
independence on the strength of shale, oil sands, and deepwater output in
Canada, Mexico, and the United States. By 2020, booming energy production
and declining consumption could have a transformative impact on the sluggish
U.S. economy, goosing GDP by more than 3 percent, reducing the current
account deficit -- the balance of imports and exports -- by 60 percent, and
creating nearly 4 million new jobs. The continent, in short, could become the
"new Middle East" in less than a decade.
The study has already had a far-reaching impact, encouraging both U.S.
political parties to revamp their energy strategies and focus not on the
dangerous U.S. dependence on Mideast oil but rather on the country's
potential to supply its own energy needs and the many benefits that come along
with doing so. When Republican Mitt Romney announced a plan to achieve
energy independence by 2020, his presidential campaign's white paper cited
the Citi report eight times. Barack Obama's campaign, meanwhile, touted the
president's commitment to reducing "our dependence on foreign oil" through
"an all-of-the-above approach to developing all our energy resources."
Morse, Citi's global head of commodities research, argues that the United
States' new role as a net petroleum-product exporter could reshape the
geopolitical landscape by weakening OPEC countries and insulating North
America from oil price spikes. "We will no longer be kowtowing to despotic
rulers and feudal monarchs whose oil supply lines are crucial to other aspects
of foreign policy," he recently predicted. And the effects could be even more
profound if a more inward-looking United States decides it no longer needs to
play the country's post-World War II role as the guarantor of global supply
lanes and protector of Gulf sheikhdoms. As for Romney's plan? "I think they
have the basic story absolutely correct," Morse told the Atlantic. And he should
know. After all, he wrote it.
Reading list:
A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American
Civil War, by Amanda Foreman; Start-Up Nation: The Story of
Israel's Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer; Power
Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of
the Future, by Robert Bryce.
Best idea:
The G-Zero world.
Worst idea:
A unilateral strike against Iran's nuclear enhancement facilities.
The energy revolution in North America could well be the source of
long-term American renewal and strength in the 21st century.
Less.
Not I, never.
24 THOMAS PIKETTY, EMMANUEL SAEZ
For making the graph that Occupied Wall Street.
Economists | France; Berkeley, Calif.

Jabs at the "1 percent" became the battle
cry of disgruntled Occupy Wall Street
protesters and the subtext of much of the
U.S. presidential campaign this year, but
they were hardly the first to draw attention
to the outsized wealth of America's top
earners. Much of the credit should go to
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Armed with a century's worth of hard
data, the two French economists have revealed just how acute income
inequality has become in the United States. And the disparity, their research
found, has recently reached levels not seen since the eve of the Great
Depression.
Piketty, at the Paris School of Economics, and Saez, at the University of
California/Berkeley, started their income-tracking project two decades ago.
Their deep dive through U.S. Internal Revenue Service tax returns dating to
1913 resulted in their signature paper, first published in 2003 and recently
updated. The study's centerpiece is a stark, U-shaped graph showing the
top 1 percent's share of total U.S. income bottoming out after World War II,
rising after the 1970s, and, by the mid-2000s, nearly matching the record set
back in 1928. (After the financial crisis, guess which group recovered fastest --
and most robustly?) Today, that squiggle has become a favorite smoking gun
of left-leaning intellectuals who argue that the rich should bear much more of
the U.S. tax burden. Piketty and Saez's work is cited in White House budget
documents and "helped to point the way for the administration in its pledge to
rebalance the tax code," according to Peter Orszag, President Barack Obama's
first budget director.
The French duo's suggested remedy is something they say is as American as
apple pie: higher income taxes on the very richest. They recommend a rate as
high as 83 percent for the top bracket of earners -- much higher than the 30
percent of the proposed "Buffett Rule" and even more than French President
Franois Hollande's proposed 75 percent top tax rate. Piketty, who calls the
level of U.S. income inequality today "completely crazy," argued this year
that the United States is switching places with Old Europe. "Inequality of
wealth and income used to be much larger in France," he told the New York
Times. "And very high taxes on the very rich -- that was invented in the United
States."
PIKETTY
Reading list:
Premodern Financial Systems, by Raymond Goldsmith; The
Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk; Arthur Young's Travels in
France, by Arthur Young.
Best idea:
Hollande's 75 percent top tax rate, if it were applied in the U.S. and
Europe with a broad tax base.
Worst idea:
Hollande's 75 percent top tax rate, as applied in France with a narrow
tax base.
Slow, steady decline.
More Europe: The world needs the United States of Europe.
No tweet so far.
25 NADIM MATTA
For showing that everyone needs a 100-day plan, not just presidents.
President, Rapid Results Institute | Stamford, Conn.
We all know the effect of a deadline when it comes to a project at work or
paying a bill. Nadim Matta sees this power as something much more
consequential. Matta is the head of the Rapid Results Institute, a nonprofit
that helps poor communities around the world set ambitious goals on timelines
so short that they seem unreasonable -- just 100 days. Rapid Results then
moves in to train locals, who coach their peers to meet the targets: build a
school in a Sudanese village, get 700 people tested for HIV in Addis Ababa,
double the number of attended births in a Rwandan town. The driving idea
behind the method, Matta believes, is that an often overlooked barrier to
development is motivation -- that final push to get over the finish line. The
work Rapid Results does, he says, is about stepping in and "unleashing local
capabilities."
This deadlines-driven approach, developed four decades ago at the
management consultancy where Matta also works, was originally applied to
Fortune 500 companies. It was Matta who adapted the method for the realm of
development -- and with impressive results. Since its founding in 2007, Rapid
Results has set down roots in more than half a dozen sub-Saharan African
countries. Nearly all of Kenya's government ministries, as well as the World
Bank, have adopted the method, and this year in the United States, it's
helping provide housing to tens of thousands of homeless people. "The biggest
issue is that people don't actually mobilize. The last mile is where solutions
need to come together in specific ways," Matta explained. "We think we have
part of the answer to the last-mile problem."
Reading list:
Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson;
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by
Chip and Dan Heath; Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can
Transform the World, by Tina Rosenberg.
Best idea:
Incubators and Internet start-ups in Arab countries -- channeling the
energy of the youth in post- (and pre-) Arab Spring countries toward
productive economic activity.
Worst idea:
The resurgence of the concept of American exceptionalism in this
election season.
Renewal, always.
About the same -- I hope.
So far I have not felt the urge to join the tweeters. Maybe in 2013.
26 AI WEIWEI
For turning his confinement into art -- and protest.
Artist | China
It has been a year of shrinking horizons for China's best-known artist turned
dissident, but as he has throughout his career, Ai Weiwei has turned his
difficult circumstances into living performance art, exposing just how petty and
paranoid even the most seemingly impregnable authoritarian system can be. Ai
was released from prison in July 2011 after being held for three months on
trumped-up tax-evasion charges. Once a source of pride for the Communist
Party as a designer of the Beijing Bird's Nest stadium, he got on the
government's bad side after ripping into its response to the 2008 Sichuan
earthquake. In September he lost his final appeal and was ordered to pay $2.4
million in back taxes; he's still not allowed to leave the country. (Many of Ai's
supporters folded money into paper planes and flew them over the walls of
his home to help him cover his bill.)
But Ai has found ways to occupy his time. When one of his Twitter followers
asked in May whether he was working on any new artwork, Ai tweeted back, "I
am the artwork." In April, he set up cameras throughout his house,
providing a live feed on his website and to his 170,000 followers. ("Twitter is
my city, my favorite city," he told FP this year.) The authorities soon
pressured him into removing the cameras, evidently preferring that they be the
only ones to watch the rotund 55-year-old work on his computer and play with
his cats.
But make no mistake -- this performance art is deeply political. Throughout his
career Ai has insisted that artists have a duty to humanity that outweighs the
obligations of nationalism. Even declaring one's opposition to "trafficking
children, selling HIV-infected blood, [and] operating slave labor coal pits" is
enough to get branded as "anti-China" in today's political climate, Ai once
noted on his blog, asking, "If we aren't anti-China, are we still human?"
In October, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington presented the first
major U.S. retrospective of Ai's work. The artist was not in attendance.
Ai-isms: Tweets from Confinement
"Love of totalitarian propaganda is more evil than hatred."
"This country does not need to give reasons. It isn't accustomed to
it, nor is it able to, until we no longer need an explanation."
"Sovereignty without human rights is just a ruler's privilege."
"Saving a country must start from saving one person."
"In the courtroom, the idiot judge went so far as to say 'Comrade Ai
Weiwei'I puked."
27 CHRISTINE LAGARDE
For investing in the Middle East when others would not.
Managing director, International Monetary Fund | Washington
While members of the U.S. Congress were threatening to cancel $450 million
in emergency aid promised to Egypt, the IMF's Christine Lagarde was meeting
with Gulf Cooperation Council representatives and laying the groundwork
for a $4.8 billion loan to rescue Egypt's damaged economy. In the wake of the
Arab Spring, which slashed growth rates across the region as political instability
overwhelmed already fragile economies and left nascent democracies
struggling to provide basic services like water and sewage treatment, the former
French finance minister -- who replaced the scandal-ridden Dominique
Strauss-Kahn midway through the 2011 uprisings -- has set about filling the
void.
The Middle East's destiny "lies ultimately with the region itself, but the
international community also has a responsibility to help," she said one year
after the protests began. Neither Washington nor Brussels has really answered
the call, so Lagarde's IMF has approved $2 billion in loans for Jordan and a
$6.2 billion liquidity line for Morocco, not to mention helping Tunisia
improve its financial sector, Libya revamp its government payment system, and
Egypt make its tax code more equitable. In total, the IMF has pledged $35
billion to the countries affected by the uprisings. U.S. President Barack
Obama's funding request for Arab Spring states this year, by comparison,
totalled just $770 million -- and Congress rejected it. If the Middle East ever
emerges from its economic morass, Lagarde and her foresight will deserve
more than a little of the credit.
28 AHMET DAVUTOGLU, RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN
For leading from the front.
Foreign minister, prime minister | Turkey
It wasn't a reference you'll ever hear in Washington's corridors of power: "I say
it very clearly: What is happening in Syria right now is exactly the same thing as
what happened in Karbala 1,332 years ago," Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said this fall, referring to one of the foundational battles of
Islam, which cemented the divide between Sunni and Shiite. The allusion to
sectarian bloodshed may have made some Western leaders cringe, but it also
showed why Turkey under Erdogan's leadership has emerged as the Middle
East's indispensable power, grappling with the region's struggles over identity
and religion in a way no American politician ever could. With the Arab world in
disarray and the United States criticized for "leading from behind," Turkey has
taken on an increasingly prominent international role, fueled by a belief that its
unique culture and history make it an ideal bridge between East and West.
But as Erdogan and his cerebral academic turned foreign minister, Ahmet
Davutoglu, are discovering, that new leadership comes at a price. Their
opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- Erdogan blasted his old
friend as presiding over a "terrorist state" -- has created new security threats
in Turkey's southeast, while the flood of more than 100,000 Syrian refugees
into its territory has stretched Ankara's resources to the breaking point. Now,
Erdogan and Davutoglu face a dilemma on Syria that is all too familiar in
Washington: stay on the sidelines or go it alone. The premier has blasted
Assad's "attempted genocide" and ordered Turkey's relentlessly globe-
trotting top diplomat, the intellectual architect of the country's newly assertive
foreign policy, to rouse the world to action. As Davutoglu put it before the
U.N. Security Council, "How long are we going to sit and watch while an entire
generation is being wiped out by random bombardment and deliberate mass
targeting?"

29 WILLEM BUITER
For warning of the Grexit.
Economist | Britain
Willem Buiter, Citigroup's chief economist, relishes a good intellectual dust-up,
especially if it involves debunking an economic conventional wisdom or two. "I
like saying things that drive people around the bend," he recently told the
Wall Street Journal.
When it comes to Europe's monetary union, Buiter has been doing just that for
quite some time. In 1999, the Dutch-born economist published a paper, "Alice
in Euroland," arguing that the European Central Bank (ECB), created a year
earlier, was so flawed it could threaten not just the embryonic common
currency but the "continued success of the post Second World War European
integration process." At the time, it seemed an unlikely critique; today, it seems
like gospel. Buiter is Europe's prophet of doom. Ever since the European debt
crisis broke out in 2009, he has considered whether debt-hobbled, bailout-
bound Greece will exit the eurozone -- a prospect so often discussed that Buiter
and a colleague coined a word in February to describe it: "Grexit." The term
went viral by May as political instability rocked Athens and the media embraced
the year's catchiest eurocrisis shorthand. By September, even Greece's
beleaguered prime minister was using it, as in: "What they call 'Grexit' is not
an option for us -- it would be a catastrophe." Buiter isn't done prophesying. In
September, his team challenged the conventional wisdom that an ECB bond-
buying program marked a turning point in the debt crisis, arguing that the plan
made a Greek departure from the eurozone "more manageable" and
estimating the probability of a Grexit in the next 12 to 18 months at 90
percent. The news isn't good for Europe either. The eurozone could be in
"cardiac arrest" for at least two to three more years, he informed clients that
same month. That's plenty of time to drive more euro-optimists around the
bend.
Reading list:
Books -- what's that?
Best idea:
Listen more to your kids.
Worst idea:
"We must have growth, not austerity."
Renewal through decline.
More please
Tweeting is for mindless illiterates.
30 ELON MUSK
For putting his money where his mind is.
Entrepreneur | Los Angeles
Look closely during a party scene in the blockbuster Iron Man 2, and you'll see
eccentric playboy billionaire Tony Stark shaking hands with Elon Musk, the
real-life model for Robert Downey Jr.'s update of the comic-book superhero.
He may not be able to fly -- yet -- but at 42, Musk's way-outside-the-box ideas
of how to make the world a better place have resulted in the creation of not one
but four of America's most innovative companies. Shortly after college, Musk
and fellow future billionaire Peter Thiel founded the online payment system
that eventually became the now-ubiquitous PayPal. After selling it for $1.5
billion in 2002, Musk started SpaceX, the private spaceflight company that in
2008 won a NASA contract to take over cargo transportation to the
International Space Station from the now-defunct space shuttle. This May,
SpaceX launched the first-ever commercial flight to the station. Musk is also
co-founder of Tesla Motors, which stands a real chance of producing the first
economically viable all-electric cars. And his latest passion project is
SolarCity, an innovative energy company that provides low-cost solar services
to businesses and is working to build electric car-charging stations in California
-- a business idea that came to Musk during a road trip to Burning Man, the
annual hippie-meets-Silicon Valley extravaganza.
He isn't done yet. Other plans include the "Hyperloop," a tube-based "fifth
mode of transportation" that he claims will one day be able to take
passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes, and an idea to
build a Mars lander that can create a mini-greenhouse to grow crops and set the
stage for eventual human habitation of the red planet. "I would like to die on
Mars," Musk has said. At this rate, it would be foolish to bet against him.

31 MARISSA MAYER, SHERYL SANDBERG
For having it all.
President and CEO, Yahoo!, COO, Facebook | Silicon Valley,
Calif.
In 2012, a record-breaking number of women reached the top of America's
Fortune 500 companies. The number that broke the record? Twenty -- just 4
percent. As more and more women enter the workplace but remain stubbornly
absent from the corner offices, the conversation about female titans of industry
has taken on a new urgency, and former Google executives Marissa Mayer and
Sheryl Sandberg are at the center of the storm.
Sandberg, now chief operating officer of Facebook, had a roller-coaster year
when the company's much-touted stock offering turned into a flop. But it was
her comments on why there are too few women in the workplace that helped
transform her into a controversial feminist icon for the tech era. In a series of
widely discussed talks, Sandberg urged women to close the "ambition gap" --
a tendency to defer to men in the workplace so as to not appear "bossy" or in
anticipation of leaving to start families. The predictable raging dispute ensued -
- and is sure to flare back up when she publishes a book on the subject in
2013 -- but through it all Sandberg has stuck to her pragmatic approach to how
women can help themselves get ahead while still getting home for dinner with
the kids (at least occasionally). Sandberg is certainly leading by example: The
mother of two young ones holds dual degrees from Harvard University, cut her
teeth at the U.S. Treasury Department as Lawrence Summers's chief of staff
(before his comments implying women are innately less capable at the sciences
than men), and tirelessly campaigns for other women to fight for having it all as
well.
For her part, Mayer announced this summer both that she was pregnant and
that she was taking the helm of troubled tech behemoth Yahoo. Disapproval
rained down from business elites, who accused her of compromising the health
of her company, and from mothers, who accused her of compromising the
health of her baby. But Mayer, a Stanford University-educated engineer who
rose from one of Google's earliest employees to a vice president, refused to be
cowed, and Yahoo agreed. Two weeks after giving birth to a boy in September,
she tweeted that she was back in the office full time and announced a new
COO to boot.
Between the two execs, the endless compromises and contradictions of the
modern working woman were laid bare, prompting a searingly honest debate
about women in power at a time when only a handful have made their way to
its most exclusive corridors. Maybe the world is finally beginning to realize that
a generation of mothers is going to need to figure out how to get to the top --
and stay there.
32 ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
For arguing that women can't have it all -- and explaining why we'd be
better off admitting it.
Political scientist | Princeton, N.J.
Anne-Marie Slaughter has been a dean at Princeton University and a top
official at the U.S. State Department, where she oversaw the first-ever attempt
to review and rationalize the sprawling bureaucracy's overseas priorities. She
has been a passionate advocate for intervention in Syria. And she is an
innovative and prolific scholar, arguing in numerous books and articles that the
stodgy foreign policy of old is being transformed by the new realities of a
networked world. But it was in another role -- as a mom and disaffected global
policymaker -- that she catapulted herself into the public eye this year.
Slaughter's summer cover article in the Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't
Have It All," chronicles her two years juggling her high-level Washington job
with the needs of two teenage boys back in New Jersey -- a balancing act she
concluded "was not possible." At more than 12,500 words, her essay on the
inflexible work environment for even the planet's most successful women
sparked a viral debate about the harsh reality of the glass ceiling in the U.S.
workplace and around the world. Her critics zeroed in on the phrase "having
it all" as implausible or even indulgent, and even Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton responded that while "some women are not comfortable working at
the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs. Other women don't
break a sweat." But Slaughter said her hope is ultimately to make it easier for
ambitious women to balance their family and professional lives -- an urgent
necessity given that fewer than 20 women lead countries in the world today, 80
percent of all parliamentary seats are held by men, and a grand total of 17
percent of the world's government ministers are women.
"I think if I had an absolutely accurate title, it would be 'Why Working Mothers
Need Better Choices to Be Able to Make It to the Top,'" Slaughter later said.
But then again, "I'm not sure a million people would have read it. And I
wanted to start a conversation. And we've started a conversation."
Reading list:
China Airborne, by James Fallows; The Locust and the Bee:
Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future, by Geoff Mulgan;
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, by Andrew Zolli and Ann
Marie Healy.
Best idea:
The "slow money" movement.
Worst idea:
The creation of national intranets and greater global regulation of the
Internet through the International Telecommunication Union.
Renewal.
More.
Tweet!
33 SALMAN RUSHDIE
For defending free speech as if his life, and ours, depended on it.
Writer | New York

More than two decades before U.S. embassies throughout the Middle East were
overrun by rioters angry about a crude anti-Islamic video and more than a
decade before the 9/11 attacks, Salman Rushdie received the phone call that
changed his life forever when a BBC reporter asked him, "How does it feel to
know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?"
This year saw the release of Rushdie's astonishingly well-timed memoir,
Joseph Anton, which describes his life in hiding after the 1989 fatwa
condemning him to death for The Satanic Verses, a book that
fundamentalists deemed offensive to the Prophet Mohammed. The title of
Rushdie's memoir comes from the pseudonym -- composed of the first names
of his favorite authors, Conrad and Chekhov -- he adopted while underground.
The book's release took on added political significance amid anti-American
riots across the world this fall provoked by the online video Innocence of
Muslims. "I always said that what happened to me was a prologue and there will
be many, many more episodes like it. This is one of those," Rushdie said.
"The correct response would be to say it is garbage and unimportant," he said of
the video. "To react to it with this kind of violence is just ludicrously
inappropriate."
Through it all, Rushdie has continued to make a powerfully personal case for
freedom of expression, writing that the fatwa was "a violent attack not on the
novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of
words, and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put
those words together."
34 PAUL KRUGMAN
For wielding his acid pen against austerity.
Economist | Princeton, N.J.
To hear Paul Krugman tell it, the U.S. economic crisis is Americans' own damn
fault. "The depression we're in is essentially gratuitous: we don't need to be
suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives," he wrote recently.
Washington's obsession with austerity is to blame, he rails; what is needed is
an aggressive, deficits-be-damned stimulus package to jump-start the economy
and get Americans working again.
The Nobel Prize-winning Princeton University economist's prescription for
the U.S. economy is actually fairly simple: Inject cash into it, and fast. He has
suggested boosting federal aid to state and local governments, providing
assistance to homeowners struggling with the deflation of the housing bubble,
and having the Federal Reserve buy up government bonds to reduce long-term
interest rates. While those ideas make Krugman anathema to those on the
right, his New York Times column is required reading by conservatives and
liberals alike -- and his insistence on providing help for struggling American
families is a welcome antidote to the Washington establishment's relentless
focus on budget cuts. "Tens of millions of our fellow citizens are suffering vast
hardship, the future prospects of today's young people are being eroded with
each passing month," he wrote, "and all of it is unnecessary.
Thanks to his academic bona fides and slashing style, Krugman -- who this year
also published a pro-stimulus book, End This Depression Now! -- has
become a sort of folk hero among liberals and a scourge of both Republicans
and moderate Democrats. One safe prediction for 2013: He'll keep on being a
thorn in the side of the powers that be, whichever way the political winds blow.
35 NOURIEL ROUBINI
For being not just gloomy, but right.
As far back as 2005, Nouriel Roubini saw dangerous speculation in the
housing market for what it was: a harbinger of financial Armageddon. At the
time, as Paul Krugman (No. 34) later noted in Time magazine, "the likes of
Alan Greenspan were dismissing concerns about excessive home prices and
declaring that banks were stronger than ever."
Since then, Roubini has hardly had time to gloat; he has been too busy warning
that the worst isn't over. In 2006, he speculated about a eurozone breakup at a
time when it seemed outlandish, and in 2008 -- when most economists were
throwing around numbers in the hundreds of billions -- Roubini warned that
bank losses would total more than $2 trillion. (It turns out he was close but if
anything too cautious: The IMF's 2010 estimate was $2.28 trillion.) He was
also ahead of the curve in identifying the global reach of the subprime-
mortgage crisis and has repeatedly warned against rosy predictions of recovery.
In 2010, when the stock market appeared to be turning around, Roubini --
dubbed Dr. Doom by the financial press -- asserted: "The crisis is not over;
we are just at the next stage."
Lately, Dr. Doom has taken to warning of a "perfect storm" in which the
"slow-motion train wreck" in Europe, along with the cooling Chinese economy
and sluggish U.S. recovery, coincides with a war between Israel and Iran that
inevitably drags in the United States. But Roubini is more than just a bearer of
bad news: He has become the gloomy bard of this age of financial upheaval.

36 SHAI RESHEF
For giving the world a shot at the Ivy League.
Founder, University of the People | Pasadena, Calif.
Every year in Nigeria, roughly 1.5 million students would like to go on to
college, but because of limited university space, only a few hundred thousand
can. That means some 80 percent of Nigerians hoping to pursue higher
education are simply out of luck. Enter Shai Reshef, an Israeli-born
entrepreneur whose online education NGO, University of the People,
promises to grant bachelor's degrees to the poor around the world -- essentially
tuition-free. Reshef's idea piggybacks on the growing migration of world-class
university lectures to the Internet, where students from any country can now
have access to the best international minds and at least a virtual slice of the Ivy
League educations that for so long were the preserve of a small elite. But his
project goes a step further, offering a full, four-year college education to
"anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection," as he told the
New York Times. His audacious goal is nothing less than to change how the
world learns.
Reshef, who made his fortune in for-profit supplementary education, does not
draw a salary from the university, which has only 10 paid employees; the
professors are all volunteers, many from top universities around the world.
Although 1,500 students in 135 countries have been admitted to University of
the People, which Reshef founded in 2009, the program is still in the process of
applying for accreditation from the U.S. government. But partnerships with
heavyweights like Yale Law School, New York University, the Gates
Foundation, and the Clinton Global Initiative hint at the outsized impact his
idea is likely to have on the world of higher ed. Reshef says University of the
People plans to increase enrollment to 5,000 students by 2015 -- and then
grow indefinitely. With 3,000 volunteers now working toward that goal, "we
don't know what to do with them," Reshef recently told the Washington Post.
Reading list:
Woman Flees Tidings, by David Grossman; Thinking, Fast and
Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; The Great Brain Race: How Global
Universities Are Reshaping the World, by Ben Wildavsky.
Best idea:
Using the goodwill of educators in developed countries to educate
students in developing countries.
Worst idea:
To attack Iran.
Note: This profile has been updated to reflect University of the People's most
recent enrollment and employee numbers.
37 DAPHNE KOLLER, ANDREW NG
For working to make education a human right.
Computer scientists | Palo Alto, Calif.
Since 1980, tuition increases at U.S. universities have outpaced the consumer
price index, inflation, and even the housing bubble that precipitated the current
financial crisis. But with the arrival of companies like Coursera, an online
educational consortium founded by Stanford University computer scientists
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, higher ed is reaching far beyond the privileged
few in the ivory tower. Through Coursera, anybody with an Internet connection
and the desire to learn can log on and tune in to courses at the world's leading
research universities -- and for now at least, it's free. "We have the incredible
opportunity to make education what it should be," Koller and Ng write, "a
fundamental human right."
Several similar programs offering "massive open online courses," or MOOCs --
most prominently Sebastian Thrun's (No. 4) Udacity and edX, a Harvard-
MIT joint venture -- have helped online education flourish in recent years.
Coursera alone is partnered with more than 30 brick-and-mortar universities,
including Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University, and
it offers a wide range of courses in engineering, computer science, math, and,
increasingly, the humanities. As of August, it had enrolled more than 1 million
students from 196 countries. The for-profit tech company has no immediate
plans to offer degrees, but its course-by-course certification scheme is already
advancing students' careers. This year, for instance, a 22-year-old computer
science student from Kazakhstan scored a job at Twitter -- after taking an
artificial intelligence course at Stanford through Coursera.
KOLLER
Reading list:
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; A Thousand
Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini; Night, by Elie Wiesel.
Best idea:
Increasing U.S. efforts in green energy.
Worst idea:
Republican attempts to cut support for family planning.
Neither.
Less.
To tweet selectively.
NG
Reading list:
The Essential Drucker, by Peter Drucker; Steve Jobs, by Walter
Isaacson; In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael
Pollan.
Best idea:
More Pell grants. Students should not have to choose between
paying for college and paying for groceries.
Worst idea:
Ouster of University of Virginia president.
Renewal.
More.
Tweet, and use hashtags wisely.

38 DICK AND LIZ CHENEY
For keeping the neocon flame alive.
Former vice president, director of Keep America Safe |
Washington
If scaring us silly were a religion, Dick Cheney would be its high priest. The
most powerful vice president in U.S. history is still waging a campaign, even
after a heart transplant in March, to convince us that the dark side of terrorists
and rogue states is out there and must be defended against at all costs. An
unrelenting critic of Barack Obama's foreign policy, Cheney has called the
president's efforts to portray himself as strong on national defense
"hogwash." In the wake of the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya in
September, Cheney framed the administration's confused response to the
attack as symptomatic of a larger failure of leadership. "They refuse to
recognize the situation we are in, and that's the first step towards ultimate
failure and ultimately the future terrorist attacks," he said on the Sean
Hannity Show.
But it may be daughter Liz, a former official in George W. Bush's
administration who founded the advocacy group Keep America Safe in 2009
and co-wrote her father's bestselling 2011 memoir, who has emerged as the
most influential and outspoken member of the Cheney family, arguing for a
more imposing U.S. presence abroad. "In too many parts of the world, America
is no longer viewed as a reliable ally or an enemy to be feared," she recently
wrote in the Wall Street Journal. The younger Cheney, a Fox News political
analyst, raised funds for Mitt Romney's campaign in her home state of
Wyoming, and there's speculation she may be planning her own run for office.
Following the Bush administration's foreign-policy controversies, many
believed the Republican Party would move away from its more pugnacious
recent past. Some, like Condoleezza Rice (No. 39), maintain a sunnier
optimism about American power. But given the hawkish rhetoric and hard-line
advisors of Romney's campaign, it seems that Cheneyism is alive and well in
today's Republican Party.
39 CONDOLEEZZA RICE
For updating Rockefeller realism for the Tea Party era.
Former secretary of state | Palo Alto, Calif.
Condi Rice has long dismissed the terms "idealist" and "realist" as meaningless
academic distinctions. An expert on the Soviet Union whose worldview shifted
dramatically with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the woman who became
George W. Bush's national security advisor and secretary of state is at once
both and neither. More than anything (and very much unlike her dark-side-
minded rival, No. 38 Dick Cheney), Rice is an optimist whose faith in historical
progress -- and America's role at its forefront -- has been likened to
"theology."
This unwavering belief in American indispensability guided her principled
critique of Barack Obama's administration this year, when she re-emerged into
the Republican spotlight with a starring role at the Republican National
Convention. "Where does America stand?" Rice asked emphatically in a
speech that drew praise from both sides of the aisle and stirred rumblings of
"Condi 2016." Without robust American leadership, she warned, chaos will
ensue -- "or someone will fill the vacuum who does not share our values." And
Rice, rarely a partisan warrior, made a pointed jab at Obama, saying, "We
cannot be reluctant to lead, and you cannot lead from behind."
Unlike much of candidate Mitt Romney's foreign-policy team, however, Rice
would have America lead the world in a decidedly moderate direction. There is
considerable continuity between the foreign policy of Bush's second term --
when Rice was secretary of state -- and that of the Obama administration. But
Rice, though she has largely escaped public blame for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, is no dove -- "Peace really does come through strength," she
reminded the audience in Tampa. Still, rebuilding America's alliances, so that
friends and partners know the United States is "reliable and consistent and
determined," and expanding free trade top Rice's priority list, as do "sensitively"
developing America's oil and natural gas reserves and coming up with new
immigration laws that "show that we are a compassionate nation of
immigrants." In a party increasingly dominated by its spoon-banging right
wing, Rice has emerged as an important voice in favor of tough, but smart,
foreign policy.

40 EUGENE KASPERSKY
For decoding the secrets of cyberwar.
Computer security expert | Russia
Boasting hundreds of millions of customers for his company's anti-virus
software, Eugene Kaspersky is one of the leading global authorities on
cybersecurity. So when he warned executives at a technology conference
this spring that "cyberweapons are the most dangerous innovation of this
century," the tech world took notice.
After all, Kaspersky was among the first to publicly document the state-
sponsored use of cyberweapons, signaling the advent of a new era of war. His
company, Kaspersky Lab, alerted the world to the danger posed by the Stuxnet
worm -- reportedly developed by the U.S. and Israeli governments -- that
attacked the Iranian nuclear program before spilling out into the wider web, as
well as the Flame virus that infected thousands of computers, mostly in the
Middle East. He has also provocatively called for Internet users to be issued
online virtual "passports" that would work like driver's licenses in the offline
world.
Kaspersky is no stranger to controversy. Before co-founding Kaspersky Lab in
1997, he was educated at a technical school sponsored by the KGB, and he
spent time working for the Russian military. He has refuted allegations that he
still has ties to Russian security services and was working on their behalf to
expose U.S. cyberweapons. "I'm just a man who's 'here to save the world,'" he
wrote in a rebuttal to a negative profile in Wired.
Kaspersky's Hobbesian view of cyberspace might be discomfiting for people
used to thinking of the Internet as a place of cute cat videos and anodyne status
updates, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that we can no longer afford to
ignore his warnings.
Reading list:
Why Smart Executives Fail -- and What You Can Learn
from Their Mistakes, by Sydney Finkelstein; Steve Jobs, by
Walter Isaacson; On China, by Henry Kissinger.
Best idea:
This was a boring year in terms of amazing ideas.
Worst idea:
Advocating cyberweapons and a cyberarms race.
Both -- renewal after decline.
More, to accelerate science, technology, education, economy, and
democracy.
Definitely yes, if you want and can write. Definitely yes, if you can't
write.
41 SIMA SAMAR
For defending Afghanistan's women, even as the world looks away.
Chair, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission | Afghanistan
Many lament the plight of women in Afghanistan -- Sima Samar has actually
done something about it. The 55-year-old doctor founded the Shuhada
("Martyrs") Organization in 1989, and it has gone on to help educate tens
of thousands of Afghan girls and provided health services to millions more.
Now, ahead of a scheduled U.S. withdrawal in 2014 that is raising the prospect
of a post-American Afghanistan where the Taliban once again force women out
of public sight, Samar insists the government in Kabul and its Western allies
take their rhetoric on women's rights seriously. As U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton put it in at a ceremony honoring Samar last year, she
challenges us to "think more deeply about what making peace really requires" -
- and it's more than just getting the men to lay down their arms.
From her perch at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission, the country's official monitor for everything from civilian rights
during wartime to detainee abuse, Samar has rung the alarm bell about the
dismal state of women's participation in modern-day Afghanistan. Even after a
decade of the United States showering Afghanistan with some $90 billion in
taxpayer dollars, there's not enough to show for it. "The sad part is that the
international community's actions do not reflect what they say," Samar said
this year. "It talks about women's rights, but then they don't include them" in
peace negotiations with the Taliban, or much of anything else. She has also
taken on her own government, loudly criticizing its reliance on Islamic law
and cultural norms that force women to wear burqas.
It's a vital message in a country where almost 90 percent of women can't read
and childbirth is more dangerous than just about anywhere else on the
plantet; a country where a woman who is raped can be prosecuted for
adultery and the female suicide rate is among the world's highest. And with
the government actively trying to bring the Taliban back into the political
process, Samar represents a bulwark against the return of the Islamist
movement's medieval vision. "I am used to playing with fire," she has said.
"Somebody has to do it."
Reading list:
Obama's Wars, by Bob Woodward; Siraj al-Tawarikh, by Faiz
Mohammad Kateb.
Best idea:
The impact of social networking.
Worst idea:
Another war in the region.
American decline.
Less Europe.
Not sure.

42 DEBBIE BOSANEK, WARREN BUFFETT
For demanding that a secretary not pay more than her
billionaire boss.
Administrative assistant, investor | Omaha, Neb.
Not long ago, the world's fourth-richest man did something very unusual: He
demanded to pay more taxes. "[W]hat I paid was only 17.4 percent of my
taxable income -- and that's actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of
the other 20 people in our office," Warren Buffett announced to a chorus of
hosannas in the New York Times.
One person who enthusiastically took up the call was U.S. President Barack
Obama, who made "Warren Buffett's secretary" part of his stump speech amid a
growing debate over skyrocketing inequality in the tax code and most other
facets of the American economy. He soon proposed a tax plan known as the
"Buffett Rule," which would impose a minimum 30 percent tax on individuals
making more than $1 million annually. (Republicans in Congress were
decidedly less enthusiastic about the idea.) In Obama's State of the Union
address in January, when he came to the line, "Right now, Warren Buffett pays
a lower tax rate than his secretary," the camera flashed on 56-year-old
Nebraska native Debbie Bosanek, a living symbol of tax inequality. The modest
Bosanek, who has worked for Buffett for two decades, says merely, "I was
representing just the average citizen who, you know, needs a voice and wants to
be treated fairly in the area of taxation." But it's clear that the Sage of Omaha
and his assistant have sparked a long overdue conversation about economic
fairness in the United States and the public policies that undermine it.
43 CHARLES MURRAY
For showing that conservatives have no monopoly on family values.
Author | Burkittsville, Md.
Charles Murray thinks that the United States is splitting at the seams, and the
culprit is a widening gap between the country's wealthy and its poor. But it's the
yawning cultural gulf between the two white Americas that he's most worried
about, as he writes in his 2012 book, Coming Apart, which paints a sad
picture of the decline of the white working class in the United States amid the
rise of a globally empowered wealthy new upper crust.
To examine this divergence, Murray devised hypothetical Fishtown and
Belmont, the first corresponding to a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood
and the second to a wealthy Boston suburb. In Fishtown, marriage rates
plunged from 84 percent to 48 percent between 1960 and 2010, the violent
crime rate sextupled, and the number of disabled quintupled. But in Belmont, a
full 83 percent of the adult population is married and 84 percent of children
live with both biological parents. In other words, Murray's conclusion is that
those Volvo-driving, latte-sipping coastal liberals got where they are today by
embracing conservative "family values," not rejecting them.
Even some critics of Murray -- whose lightning-rod views came to the fore with
his controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve -- have called Coming Apart a
compelling portrait of a new problem that American politics has yet to grapple
with. "The word 'class' doesn't even capture the divide Murray describes," New
York Times columnist David Brooks wrote. "You might say the country has
bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking
them." Rich and poor Americans used to engage in the same leisure activities
and live in the same ZIP codes, but today, as Murray notes, it's inconceivable to
imagine Belmont's 1 percenters turning up at Applebee's or a NASCAR race.
"The problem I describe isn't a conservative-versus-liberal problem," Murray
said. "It's a cultural problem the whole country has."
Reading list:
Losing Mum and Pup, by Christopher Buckley; Emperor series, by
Conn Iggulden; A History of Britain, by Simon Schama.
Best idea:
Using a palm scan as a replacement for all computer passwords.
Worst idea:
The National Security Agency's new Utah facility that will effectively
capture everything U.S. citizens do electronically, encrypted or not, and
store it indefinitely.
If Obama wins, American decline, perhaps abrupt. If Romney wins,
perhaps stabilization (at best).
Monetary union without centralization of fiscal policy was doomed to
fail, and Europe is deep in the endgame.
For me, it has turned out to be an acquired taste. I have fun with it.

44 ANDREW MARSHALL
For thinking way, way outside the Pentagon box.
Military futurist | Washington
Known as the Pentagon's "futurist in chief" -- or, more affectionately, "Yoda"
among Defense Department insiders -- Andrew Marshall has spent the past 40
years speculating about over-the-horizon threats to the United States. At the
top of his list today: a rapidly militarizing and increasingly belligerent China. As
the longtime director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, the
nonagenarian Marshall has spent recent years devising battle plans for an
admittedly unlikely showdown with Beijing.
But unlikely scenarios are Marshall's specialty. The details of his blueprint,
known as the Air-Sea Battle, are classified, but its aim is to coordinate the
U.S. Air Force and Navy more closely in order to respond to future threats to
the global commons, not just in potential flash points like the South China Sea
but all over the world -- even helping the military reach melting ice caps in the
Arctic. Marshall's ambitious "organizing concept," as Air Force Secretary
Michael Donley calls it, has moved outside the realm of ideas as Barack
Obama's administration has sought to turn its proclaimed "pivot" to Asia into
military reality. A hot war with China, for one, would be one of the most
complicated logistical problems in U.S. military history. In that sense, Air-Sea
Battle is bigger than any single military doctrine -- it's a bureaucratic
reorientation that has already inspired more than 200 Air Force and Navy
initiatives, including a new precision conventional-weapons system called
Prompt Global Strike, as well as the Next-Generation Bomber program. Wired
magazine has called Marshall's concept a "help desk for 21st Century warfare."
Marshall, an appointee of Richard Nixon who has been reappointed by every
president since, seems also to have shaped Chinese military strategy. Gen.
Chen Zhou, who helped write China's four most recent defense white papers,
told the Economist, "Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon. We
translated every word he wrote."
45 ALEXEY NAVALNY
For finding the Kremlin's weak spot.
Activist blogger | Russia
Alexey Navalny almost single-handedly reinvented Russia's moribund activist
culture for the digital era. Soon, he could be spending his days behind bars, if
President Vladimir Putin has his way. A commercial-rights lawyer by training,
Navalny painstakingly built a large following in recent years for his unique
LiveJournal blog, a pioneering exercise in accountability in which he and his
loyal readers sift through mountains of paperwork to uncover corrupt practices
by Russia's political and business elite -- a busy job in a country that ranks
143rd on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.
After exposing embezzlement and malfeasance at major state-owned energy
companies and banks, he turned to politics more explicitly. Navalny famously
described Putin's ruling United Russia party as the "party of crooks and
thieves," a nickname that stuck and helped fuel the anti-regime protests that
began in late 2011. Navalny took a central role in organizing those protests,
sparked by Putin's impending return to the presidency -- a process that felt
more like a coronation than an election. Regularly at the forefront of major
demonstrations in Moscow, the blogger has ties to nationalist parties rather
than the traditional Western-backed anti-Putin intelligentsia, making him a
particularly potent, homegrown threat. Navalny has said he took inspiration
from Arab Spring uprisings, telling Reuters, "If they do not voluntarily start
to reform by themselves, I do not doubt that this will happen in Russia."
Now the Kremlin has seemingly struck back by filing charges of embezzlement
against Navalny. Although they appear dubious, they're certainly cause for
concern given the fate of Kremlin critics like former oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, now in his ninth year in prison. Of course, if the authorities
do lock up Navalny, they'll only be proving his point.

46 THOMAS MANN, NORMAN ORNSTEIN
For diagnosing America's political dysfunction.
Political scientists | Washington
The past few years have produced one testament after another to America's
broken political system: the most partisan Congress on record, the first U.S.
credit-rating downgrade ever, one of the most polarizing presidencies
in recent memory, and the least popular and productive U.S. legislature in
modern history.
But that's usually where the conversation ends. Enter the Brookings
Institution's Thomas Mann and the American Enterprise Institute's Norman
Ornstein, two of the Beltway's most respected congressional experts, who had
the temerity to point fingers and name names. Their verdict, rendered in their
new book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, is surprisingly blunt for two
such consummate centrist insiders: The increasingly adversarial relationship
between the Democrats and Republicans is imperiling America's constitutional
democracy, and the GOP is the primary villain.
The Republican Party "has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the
inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise;
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science;
and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition," they write, while
allowing that the Democratic Party is "no paragon of civic virtue" either. The
"asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush
aside or whitewash in a quest for 'balance,' constitutes a huge obstacle to
effective governance," they add.
It's hard to disagree, when Republicans' obstinate refusal to countenance any
new revenues has America staring at a "fiscal cliff" that independent
economists warn could plunge the country into a new recession. We can't say
they didn't warn us.
MANN
Reading list:
Our Divided Political Heart, by E.J. Dionne; The New New
Deal, by Michael Grunwald; Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel
Kahneman.
Best idea:
Progressive consumption tax pegged to the state of the economy.
Worst idea:
Libertarianism.
Renewal (if we get our republic working effectively once again).
More.
Not for me.
ORNSTEIN
Reading list:
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of
American Politics, by Jeff Greenfield; The New New Deal, by
Michael Grunwald; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are
Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.
Best idea:
A lottery prize for voting.
Worst idea:
We need more permanent tax cuts.
Teetering at the edge, but renewal is more likely.
More.
Not me, thanks.
47 MOHAMMAD FAHAD AL-QAHTANI
For putting Saudi Arabia on trial.
Activist | Saudi Arabia
"Make no mistake," Saudi activist Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani said this
summer after being arraigned on a long list of charges accusing him of
promoting sedition. "We are all going to prison." It's hard to argue with that:
The Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, which Qahtani co-
founded, has broken some of Saudi Arabia's biggest taboos, highlighting
corruption within the monarchy and questioning its legitimacy to govern.
Qahtani, an American-educated economics professor outraged at Saudi
Arabia's treatment of political prisoners, has been at the forefront of efforts to
popularize the idea that even citizens of one of the planet's most repressive and
unaccountable monarchies deserve to be treated like human beings, regardless
of what lies beneath its sands. "All authoritarian rule is illegitimate, even more
so when it is an apartheid and despotic regime," a petition posted on his
group's website reads.
The Saudi regime charged Qahtani with "breaking allegiance to the
ruler," but the activist has tried to put the entire government on trial. Banned
from leaving the country as he awaits his verdict, he faces years in prison if
convicted. Although few Saudis are nearly as outspoken, Qahtani hears the
rumblings of dissent on the horizon. "Eventually, the regime will fail," he told
Al-Monitor. "This price is a small token for regaining our people's liberty and
freedom."
Reading list:
The Oil Kings, by Andrew Scott Cooper; On Saudi Arabia: Its
People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines -- and Future, by Karen
Elliott House; Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain
Future of an American Ally, by Thomas W. Lippman.
Best idea:
The increasing possibility of political change in Saudi Arabia that will
bring about democracy.
Worst idea:
Stories that still praise tyrannies in Arab countries.
American renewal.
Europe will weather the storm. We will see "more Europe."
I do tweet. @MFQahtani.
48 ABDULHADI, MARYAM, AND ZAINAB AL-KHAWAJA, NABEEL
RAJAB
For insisting that free speech is a right, no matter where you live.
Activists | Bahrain
Bahrain, the tiny archipelago wedged between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is the
only country where tear gas and buckshot have succeeded (so far) in
squelching an Arab Spring uprising. And for the ruling monarchy, the brave
activists who run the Bahrain Center for Human Rights are Public Enemy
No. 1.
The center, co-founded in 2002 by Nabeel Rajab, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, and
others, played a vital role in advancing the idea that all Bahrainis should be
treated equally in this religiously divided kingdom, regardless of their sect. But
after Rajab called via Twitter for a powerful member of the ruling family to
step down, the monarchy had enough -- in July he was hauled into prison for
"insulting" Bahrainis. Khawaja, who has been a thorn in the government's side
since the 1970s, fared even worse: His jaw was shattered in four places by
police upon his arrest last year, and he subsequently embarked on a marathon
hunger strike that turned him into a global cause clbre.
The activists' sacrifices, however, have gone largely unrecognized in
Washington, which has been only too eager to ignore the revolt in a country
that hosts a critical U.S. naval base and is an ally in efforts to isolate Iran. "It
has become evident today that, to the United States, democracy and human
rights should only be applied to countries that are in conflict with the United
States -- but not with dictatorships it calls its allies," Rajab told Foreign
Policy before his arrest. With the two veteran opposition leaders in jail, the
Khawaja daughters, Maryam, 25, and Zainab, 29, have taken up their father's
mantle to remind Americans that their founding principles are applicable the
world over. "This is an issue of pride and dignity. People are sick and tired of
living in a country where they cannot speak about what is on their mind,"
Zainab told Der Spiegel. "I am speaking out, but we are paying a high price for
it."
MARYAM AL-KHAWAJA
Reading list:
Iran Awakening: One Woman's Journey to Reclaim Her
Life and Country, by Shirin Ebadi; Little Daughter: A Memoir
of Survival in Burma and the West, by Zoya Phan; The Lady
and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, by Peter
Popham.
Best idea:
Developing laws that protect people online.
Worst idea:
Use of drones.
Decline.
More.
To always tweet.
RAJAB
Reading list:
As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, by
Catherine Claire Larson; An Autobiography: The Story of My
Experiments with Truth, by Mohandas Gandhi; Call of Surat
(history book in Arabic).
Best idea:
We got rid of some autocratic tyrants during the Arab Spring.
Worst idea:
Tribal and sectarian feuds taking over.
American decline.
Less Europe and weaker eurozone.
To tweet.

49 HARUKI MURAKAMI
For his vast imagination of a globalized world.
Novelist | Japan
When New York Times Magazine critic Sam Anderson visited Tokyo last year
to interview Haruki Murakami, he arrived, he later wrote, "expecting
Barcelona or Paris or Berlin -- a cosmopolitan world capital whose straight-
talking citizens were fluent not only in English but also in all the nooks and
crannies of Western culture: jazz, theater, literature, sitcoms, film noir, opera,
rock 'n' roll." It's no wonder -- Anderson had immersed himself in Murakami's
fictional Japan, where ennui-afflicted characters read Kafka and listen to
Thelonious Monk. Although his novels are set in his insular native country,
Murakami has become something of a patron saint of globalization.
Growing up outside Kobe, Murakami became enamored of American jazz and
Western writers, from Dostoyevsky to Vonnegut, Dickens to Capote. He owned
a jazz club in Tokyo before turning to the world of fiction, where he is
renowned for his genre-bending novels that span different universes yet are
littered with real-world cross-cultural references. Now, with 12 novels and
dozens of short stories translated into more than 40 languages, Murakami is
his country's most famous living author.
His latest novel, the nearly 1,000-page 1Q84, has been hailed as a lively, if
bizarre, creative achievement and a paean to a Tokyo that Murakami calls "a
kind of civilized world." But Murakami doesn't shy away from hot political
topics. Last year he controversially called Japan's Fukushima nuclear accident
a "mistake committed by our very own hands." And this year, after his books
were pulled from shelves in China amid a territorial dispute with Japan, he
chalked up the standoff to the "cheap liquor" of nationalism. 1Q84's title is a
nod to the classic by George Orwell, with whom Murakami says he has a
"common feeling against the system" -- a subversiveness he perhaps best
expresses by creating a universe all his own.
50 ROBERT KAGAN
For writing the one book Obama and Romney could agree on.
Author | Washington
These days, it's nearly impossible to get Republicans and Democrats to agree
on anything. But Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,
managed to capture the attention of both left and right with this year's The
World America Made. The book, which argues forcefully that American
decline is a myth and calls for a continued assertive U.S. role in world affairs,
was a major influence on Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address,
in which the president declared, "Anyone who tells you that America is in
decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking
about." Mitt Romney's campaign, meanwhile, brought on Kagan as a foreign-
policy advisor.
Kagan, whose previous big-think book cemented the Bush-era image of a
muscular America from Mars and a soft-power Europe from Venus amid
the disagreements of the Iraq war, now makes a powerful case that the present
international order rests on U.S. military and economic might -- not its liberal
values. Maintaining American hegemony is imperative for global peace and
security, he argues, because "one of the main causes of war throughout
history has been a rough parity of power that leaves nations in doubt about
who is stronger." In an election year, it's not difficult to see why Kagan's
narrative about America's indispensability appealed to both parties. Romney,
for example, took to including a line or two about how America is the
"greatest country in the history of the world" in his speeches. Obama liked the
book so much that he reportedly spent 10 minutes during a meeting with
leading media personalities going over an excerpt line by line.
Reading list:
Breaking the Heart of the World, by John Milton Cooper;
George F. Kennan, by John Lewis Gaddis; Berlin 1961, by
Frederick Kempe.
Best idea:
Reviving the long-form essay.
Worst idea:
More social networking.
Renewal.
More.
Not.

51 NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA
For showing Africa how to break the resource curse.
Finance minister | Nigeria
As a candidate in this year's unusually public race for the World Bank
presidency, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala seemingly had it all: an MIT education, high-
level experience with both the bank and the Nigerian government, the potential
to be the first woman and first person of color to run the institution, and the
support of everyone from the African Union to the Financial Times. She just
didn't have the one thing that really mattered: a U.S. passport.
But though she may have missed out on her chance to run the bank --
American Jim Yong Kim got the post -- Okonjo-Iweala is arguably as influential
in her role as the powerful finance minister of Africa's most populous country
and one of its fastest-growing economies. In a previous stint in the position,
she successfully negotiated to wipe out millions of dollars of international debt,
and since reassuming the post last year she has cut spending and helped
establish a sovereign wealth fund to manage Nigeria's oil riches. Her driving
idea: African countries can't hope to develop economically until they get their
institutions in order.
It hasn't always been easy. Although she enjoys a potent mandate from
President Goodluck Jonathan, Okonjo-Iweala has seen her reform efforts
consistently meet opposition from the "godfathers" -- the powerful officials
who benefit from the oil wealth in Nigeria's notoriously corrupt political
system. Her efforts to end a popular but economically disastrous fuel subsidy
have also so far been slow going. "It has not been easy, and the struggle is still
ongoing," she told Reuters this year. "You make progress; then you get
courage to make more." If she can succeed in helping one of Africa's most
pivotal countries overcome the infamous oil curse, it might have a much more
lasting impact than anything she could have accomplished back in Washington.
52 MARTIN FELDSTEIN
For getting the eurocrisis right -- two decades ago.
Economist | Cambridge, Mass.
You might call Martin Feldstein, a former head of the National Bureau of
Economic Research and chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Council of
Economic Advisers, the original euroskeptic. "If a single currency is
accepted," the longtime Harvard University economist wrote back in 1992,
"national governments might soon have to decide whether to accept the greater
volatility of employment and incomes that comes from abandoning an
independent monetary policy and flexible exchange rate, or accept instead the
loss of national sovereignty over taxes and spending." (Translation: The euro is
doomed.) He doubled down on his argument five years later in Foreign
Affairs, warning of the "danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits"
and the "adverse economic effects of a single currency on unemployment and
inflation."
With the seemingly successful introduction of the euro in 1999, Feldstein was
in a distinct minority. He stuck to his guns, however, even suggesting in 2008
-- a month before Slovakia joined the euro (ironically, to seek relief from the
global financial panic) -- that a eurozone breakup could be "a real possibility."
Now, amid the very real talk of just such a breakup, Feldstein has turned to
critiquing European leaders' responses to the meltdown. Some of his
predictions -- Greece defaulting and exiting the eurozone, for example --
have yet to come true. Feldstein can point to his prescience, however, noting
that his early warnings "were pretty much on target, even though they were
written 20 years ago."

53 MOHAMED EL-ERIAN
For charting the economy's new new normal.
CEO, Pimco | Newport Beach, Calif.
The Great Recession is coming up roses for Mohamed El-Erian. The Egyptian-
American investor has already emerged as one of the most important theorists
of the economic downturn -- positing a "new normal" of sluggish growth and
lower returns -- and is poised to take over the investment firm Pimco,
making him what the New York Times called the bond markets' "new leading
man."
El-Erian, who made his intellectual reputation by describing the destructive
cycle between financial crises and political instability, had proclaimed that
2012 would be "Europe's moment of truth." Now the verdict is in, and El-
Erian's warnings about the collapse of the eurozone and global market
contagion seem more Cassandra-like than ever. Europe, El-Erian said
recently, is simply avoiding the tough decisions that will allow it to recover.
"Greece is like the infection in your toe. If you don't pay attention to it, it's
small, and then the next thing you know, it's spread to your leg, and the next
thing you know it's affecting your vital organs," he said. "You've got to deal with
it. And Europe has not dealt with the problem of Greece." Although El-Erian
saw the current financial crisis coming before just about anyone, he lays the
blame for this latest downturn squarely at the feet of politicians, whose endless
bickering and buck-passing have become the dangerous "new new normal."
Now, when the markets come crashing down, he writes, Western leaders
"won't have anyone to blame but themselves."
54 YU JIANRONG
For daring to be specific about how to change China.
Director, Center for the Study of Social Problems | China
China's leaders often declare publicly that their country needs to "reform."
"Reform can only move forward," Premier Wen Jiabao waxed after the
country's rubber-stamp legislature met in March. "It cannot stagnate. Even
more so, it can't move backward." But China's mandarins rarely elaborate on
just what reform means, preferring instead to govern by cryptic slogans and
vague pronouncements.
Not so Yu Jianrong, the rare Chinese academic who has taken up the challenge
of defining how exactly China could change course -- and from inside the
system. In April, he released a succinct, two-phase plan he called a "10-Year
Outline of China's Social and Political Development." Despite its bland title,
Yu's blueprint offers a timetable for Chinese reform that for once is as credible
as it is ambitious. The plan puts dates and specifics to the task, advocating, for
example, a stronger law on private property, the revealing of "information
pertaining to government affairs" and "officials' property," and the abolition of
"speech crimes," after which China should "open up" the media and political
parties. Yu's short manifesto immediately caused a splash when he released it
to his nearly 1.5 million followers on the popular microblogging site Sina
Weibo (though the government has maintained a deafening silence). "We've
already decided to change," Yu explained in an interview. "The question is: In
which direction do we change, and from where do we start?" Sweeping reform
in this authoritarian land of 1.3 billion won't be easy, but Yu's plan is as good a
place to begin as any. The era, he said, of crossing the river "by feeling the
stones" is over.
Best idea:
Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize.
Worst idea:
Political reform in China may be delayed.
Renewal.
Less.

55 MICHAEL SANDEL
For revealing the moral limits of markets.
Political philosopher | Cambridge, Mass.
Today, the old clich that money can buy anything is more true than ever. The
going rate for an Indian woman's womb is about $8,000, the right to emit a
metric ton of carbon dioxide costs $10.50, and for $15 to $20 an hour, a man
will stand in line overnight for a lobbyist who wishes to attend a congressional
hearing. On the one hand, it's a testament to the power of the modern market,
where efficiency rules and anything is open to free exchange. But should
everything be for sale? That is the burning question posed by Harvard
University professor Michael Sandel, who has emerged as the world's foremost
critic of the rush toward "commodification."
The problem with putting a price on everything, Sandel argues in his new book,
What Money Can't Buy, is twofold. First, it exacerbates inequality: When
more and more goods and services -- including health care, education, and
political access -- can be bought and sold like gold or oil futures, the rich can
accumulate them in greater amounts. Second, placing objects and ideas on the
free market, Sandel argues, often degrades their social value. Think, for
example, of the growing practice of paying students to read. In our quest to
boost test scores, are we recasting learning as a chore rather than a joy?
At Harvard, Sandel teaches one of the university's most popular courses --
simply titled "Justice" -- which in a single semester has drawn upwards of 800
students, to whom he poses vexing moral dilemmas. A runaway train is
hurtling toward a fork in the track. On one side, Gandhi lies tied to the rails; on
the other, two ordinary individuals. Should you save Gandhi or save the two
others? What if 10 people were on the other side? Sandel has also become an
international phenomenon and a pioneer in the democratization of a world-
class education: His class is now an internationally syndicated television show,
making him a minor rock star in China, Japan, and South Korea, where his
open-ended teaching style and focus on big questions are far from the norm.
The introductory lecture for "Justice" has tallied more than 4 million views on
YouTube. Who knew a philosophy-minded professor's tough questions about
Bentham and Kant could compete with cat videos and "Gangnam Style"?
Reading list:
The Syrian Rebellion, by Fouad Ajami; Strings Attached:
Untangling the Ethics of Incentives, by Ruth W. Grant; How
Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, by Robert and
Edward Skidelsky.
56 JOHN BRENNAN
For bringing the war on terror to the real enemy -- al Qaeda.
White House counterterrorism advisor | Washington
John Brennan has been at war with al Qaeda longer than any other top U.S.
official, and he has learned a trick or two along the way. The 25-year CIA
veteran has gone from a supporter of "enhanced interrogation techniques"
under George W. Bush to the architect of Barack Obama's counterterrorism
strategy, emphasizing pinpoint strikes and commando raids over grandiose
attempts to transform the cultures of distant lands. And he has reframed
Bush's expansive war on terror as a more focused mission to dismantle specific
terrorist groups in places like Somalia and Yemen.
Brennan no longer operates only from the shadows. He has mounted a public
defense of the White House's reliance on drone strikes, which have emerged as
Obama's signature tool in hunting terrorists, as "legal, ethical, and wise," in
a bid to convince skeptics that the administration has wielded its extraordinary
powers responsibly. And he has largely won the argument: More than 60
percent of Americans support drone strikes to target terrorists abroad.
Brennan, reportedly the last man in the room with Obama before the president
decides to order a strike, doesn't take these life-or-death decisions lightly. The
man whom colleagues refer to as the "priest" of the counterterrorism effort
has formulated a moral blueprint for when to call in the drones. "It is the option
of last recourse," he explained this year. Obama "wants to make sure that we
go through a rigorous checklist: the infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the
intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things."
57 JAMEEL JAFFER
For insisting that assassination is not an American value.
Director, ACLU Center for Democracy | New York
Barack Obama has turned drones into his signature counterterrorism tool,
even personally selecting targets from a "kill list" as he has deployed this new
sort of air force to rain death down on terrorists across two continents and
bludgeon al Qaeda into submission. But far too much of the U.S. president's
secret assassination program has been shielded from legal scrutiny -- and
Jameel Jaffer, an influential lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union
specializing in national security issues, is working to change that.
"[T]he legal foundation of the targeted killing campaign is not simply shaky,
but rotten," Jaffer wrote this year. For the first time, he's forcing the CIA to
justify its veil of secrecy: In a landmark court case, he's challenging its
consistent refusal, over several years, to confirm or deny the drone program's
existence. Even as multiple U.S. officials -- from Obama on down -- have
spoken publicly about the strikes, America's top spies still refuse to say whether
they have records about the drone program, let alone share them.
Jaffer, who played a central role in challenging the warrantless wiretapping
program and use of torture under George W. Bush, isn't giving Obama a pass
either. "Remember outcry after Bush detained Americans as [enemy
combatants]?" Jaffer recently tweeted. "Imagine the outcry if he'd proposed
killing them (secretly!) instead."
Reading list:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander; Mating, by Norman Rush;
NW, by Zadie Smith.
Best idea:
The Arab Spring was a good idea, and still is.
Worst idea:
Canada's decision to close its embassy in Iran.
Private opulence and public squalor (as John K. Galbraith said).
More would be good, but less is more likely.
Tweet, but regret it constantly.

58 BJORN LOMBORG
For taking the black and white out of climate politics.
Director, Copenhagen Consensus Center | Czech Republic
The climate-change debate's most consistent iconoclast continued to go after
environmental sacred cows this year, dismissing the Rio+20 summit as a
"wasted opportunity," warning against "policy by panic" efforts to connect
this summer's droughts to global warming, and celebrating hydraulic
fracturing as "this decade's best green-energy option."
But Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist often mislabeled a "climate
skeptic," is more than just a critic of environmentalism run amok. In a world of
terrifyingly daunting problems and limited resources, Lomborg doesn't say that
global warming isn't happening; he tries to urge leaders to think realistically
about what to tackle first. For his innovative Copenhagen Consensus 2012
project, he convened a panel of more than 50 experts, including four Nobel-
winning economists, and asked them how they would spend $75 billion -- a 15
percent increase in global aid spending -- to most efficiently bolster global
welfare. The panel's top recommendations were interventions to fight
hunger and improve education, as well as increasing subsidies for malaria
treatment and childhood immunizations. Research to "fight biodiversity
destruction and lessen the effects of climate change"? That came in sixth.
Reading list:
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; Sustainable
Energy -- Without the Hot Air, by David MacKay; The Haves
and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of
Global Inequality, by Branko Milanovic.
Best idea:
Fracking gas could be this decade's best green option -- it has actually
reduced U.S. emissions twice what the Kyoto Protocol ever did.
Worst idea:
Predictions that 100 million people would die from global warming by
2030 -- turned out it was exaggerated more than 12-fold, to get
attention.
59 HAMAD BIN KHALIFA AL THANI
For filling the leadership vacuum in the Middle East.
Emir | Qatar
If there's one man who has stepped into the void in the Middle East, it's Hamad
bin Khalifa Al Thani, the ruler of a tiny country that few had heard of. Some
might say it's his vast oil and natural gas wealth that has made the enigmatic
emir a major player in conflict zones as varied as Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq,
Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen -- not to mention Palestine, where Qatar
has largely usurped Egypt's role as the principal mediator between the
feuding factions of Hamas and Fatah.
But the Qatari emir, who has been called the "Arab Henry Kissinger," is not
just a sheikh with a big bank account. His ambition is nothing less than the
remapping of power dynamics in the Arab world. Known for his grit and
determination, which enabled him to turn the nearly bankrupt statelet he
inherited in a bloodless 1995 coup into the planet's richest country, the emir
also knows how to play great powers off each other to get what he wants. Qatar
is home to one of the largest U.S. air bases, but the canny emir maintains
cordial relations with his neighbors in Tehran as well, never mind his
misgivings. (In one leaked 2010 diplomatic cable, he told U.S. Sen. John Kerry
that "based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100
words. Trust only one of the 100.")
Magnifying Sheikh Hamad's voice is Qatari media giant Al Jazeera, which
became the "unquestioned home of the revolution" during the Arab Spring, as
FP's Marc Lynch put it. Not content simply to cheer the revolutionaries from
the sidelines, the Qatari emir took the lead in mustering Arab League support
for the NATO intervention that toppled Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, provided
at least $400 million in aid for the rebels, and helped them establish training
camps. He has also unveiled a mini-Marshall Plan for the post-Arab Spring
world, pledging billions of dollars in aid and investment to Egypt, Tunisia,
Yemen, and Gaza. Now the loudest Arab voice calling for intervention in Syria,
Sheikh Hamad, at September's U.N. General Assembly meeting, urged Arab
countries to "do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria." Based on his
track record, the rest of the world will get there -- eventually.

60 HEW STRACHAN
For asking the generals, What are you doing with all those guns?
Military historian | Britain
Hew Strachan may be an expert on World War I, but the Oxford University
professor isn't stuck in the past. He has emerged as one of the world's
preeminent thinkers on the character of modern warfare at a time when
governments are confronting a host of new realities, from drones to
cyberattacks to asymmetrical warfare. And he has the ear of top U.S.
military officials. Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Central Command, is one
of many to call himself one of Strachan's students.
Strachan would tell you that war hasn't changed as much as we may think
because states are still the primary actors in conflict. But, perhaps more than
any other military scholar, he has pressed civilian leaders to think deeply about
how they articulate strategy, while urging military leaders to wrestle with their
role in implementing it. He argues that since the 1980s, the U.S. Army has
had an ever freer hand in running America's wars, while opting out all but
entirely from the crucial policy debates on whether and in what way to use
military force. Conflict, Strachan writes, became "a policy-free zone, in which
military expertise was unfettered and where armies reasserted their authority
over war's conduct." Unsurprisingly, he thinks this is what led to disastrously
unsound strategy post-9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the dramatic 2010
firing of Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, which
Strachan says stemmed from the general's frustration over a lack of political
guidance from the capital. And he has lacerated Barack Obama's administration
for sending mixed messages to Afghans and Americans alike, citing its failure to
understand that in modern warfare, communications are strategy. Reflecting
on the war on terror in late 2011, Strachan made an observation that could
equally apply to many of today's conflicts: "The paradox of having wars with big
objectives, at least in declaratory terms, but only being ready to use limited
means and limited levels of mobilization to fight them, puts you in a pretty
confused place."
Reading list:
The Generals: American Military Command from World
War II to Today, by Thomas E. Ricks; And the Land Lay Still,
by James Robertson; War from the Ground Up, by Emile
Simpson.
Best idea:
Reintroducing the idea of victory in counterinsurgency.
Worst idea:
Bombing Iran.
Decline unless the U.S. recognizes the need for renewal.
Less.
Not to tweet.
61 HUSAIN HAQQANI, FARAHNAZ ISPAHANI
For pushing tough love for their troubled country.
Former Pakistani officials | Washington
Husain Haqqani and Farahnaz Ispahani have spent their careers fighting the
slow-motion radicalization of Pakistan -- even as it became increasingly
obvious that the deck was stacked against them. The husband and wife, now in
self-imposed exile in the United States, were two of Islamabad's most
prominent interlocutors with Washington as jihadists spread throughout
Pakistan's tribal areas and Osama bin Laden was discovered a mile away from
the country's version of West Point. Now, after a career defending Pakistan's
deeply unpopular ties to the United States, Haqqani is beginning to think it's
time for a geopolitical divorce.
"If in 65 years, you haven't been able to find sufficient common ground to live
together, and you had three separations and four reaffirmations of marriage,
then maybe the better way is to find friendship outside of the marital bond,"
Haqqani, a scholar of the Pakistani military, said in August. Ispahani,
meanwhile, has tried to push Pakistan toward a frank discussion of its internal
demons. The real struggle in Pakistan, she wrote this year, is "the systematic
elimination" of anyone who stands up to the country's generals, who have
created "a militarized Islamist state." She found out what standing up to them
means in Pakistan's parliament, where she was a leading voice calling for the
repeal of the country's notorious blasphemy laws -- an explosive cause that has
cost several of Pakistan's leading liberal politicians their lives at the hands of
Islamist killers.
Their outspokenness has had its own cost: Haqqani was forced to resign as
Pakistan's ambassador to Washington and was hauled before a Pakistani court
over allegations that he had sought U.S. help to head off a possible military
coup, while Ispahani was stripped of her seat in parliament, ostensibly
because she holds dual U.S.-Pakistani nationality. Instead of convincing
Washington to rush to their aid, however, they're trying to convince Pakistanis
that their true struggles can't be won by burning American flags. As Ispahani
tweeted recently: "Stop blaming the world -- look inside."
HAQQANI
Reading list:
The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for
Democracy, by William J. Dobson; The World America Made,
by Robert Kagan.
Best idea:
Containment of totalitarian Islamism.
Worst idea:
Leading from behind.
American renewal.
More Europe.
Tweet, but only meaningfully and with purpose.
ISPAHANI
Reading list:
Ideas of a Nation, by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad; Silenced: How
Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom
Worldwide, by Paul Marshall and Nina Shea; Realizing Human
Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact, edited by
Samantha Power and Graham Allison.
Best idea:
Using social media to defeat the overwhelming presence of jihadi
extremists on social media.
Worst idea:
Not intervening in Syria immediately with the backing of the
international community.
American renewal.
Europe with all its issues is still a more reliable partner than any
others. Will prevent a resurgent Russia.
Always tweet. So many ideas emerge; so many conversations with
ordinary people, intellectuals, and voiceless groups happen on Twitter
and only on Twitter.

62 ESTHER DUFLO
For relentlessly testing our assumptions about poverty.
A tenured MIT professor since age 29, winner of various top-notch economics
prizes, co-author of a groundbreaking book on poverty (last year's Poor
Economics) -- Esther Duflo, still just 40, is firmly cemented among the
world's elite economists. Her place there is secured by a relentless (and prolific)
dedication to the novel proposition that we should subject our wishful thinking
about how to help poor people to cold, hard analyses of whether those ideas
actually work.
She and her Poor Economics co-author, Abhijit Banerjee (her partner in life
too -- they had a baby this year), are co-founders and directors of MIT's Abdul
Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where they have the radical idea of actually
asking poor people about how they live and subjecting the various programs
aimed at helping them to real, scientific, randomized controlled trials to
evaluate their effectiveness. This year, for example, Duflo and two colleagues
released a study debunking the oft-touted saving graces of Western-designed
cookstoves. Contradicting previous laboratory results, a four-year trial in one
Indian state found no evidence that families that received the stoves had
improved lung function or reduced their fuel consumption. "More broadly,"
Duflo's team wrote in what could be read as her raison d'tre, "this study
underscores the need to test environmental and health technologies in real-
world settings where behavior may temper impacts."
Despite results that often show good intentions aren't nearly good enough,
Duflo insists her work should be seen as encouraging. "The fact that policies
often fail for no good reason is annoying but less depressing than the view that
it is a big conspiracy against the poor," she explained to the Financial Times
this year. "Name your favorite enemy -- capitalism, corruption. Our view is
easier. You think hard about the problems and you can solve them."
Reading list:
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo; Random
Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc; The Spy Who Came in from
the Cold, by John le Carr.
63 KIYOSHI KUROKAWA
For daring to tell a complacent country that groupthink can kill.
Doctor | Japan
On March 11, 2011, tsunami waves from the worst earthquake Japan had ever
seen slammed the island country. Some 15,872 people died; 129,577 buildings
collapsed; and three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
in eastern Japan suffered a full meltdown, spewing radiation into the air and
tainting a 50-mile radius of surrounding area. In the national debate that
followed, the Japanese government commissioned three major reports to
determine what happened. The most searing one was chaired by the outspoken
Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a medical doctor and emeritus professor who blasted
"collusion" between government regulators and Tokyo Electric Power Co.,
which runs the plant, for causing the disaster.
In Japan's opaque political system, Kurokawa's report amounted to a
bombshell. Following a six-month investigation, including interviews with
more than 1,100 people, he concluded not only that the Fukushima disaster
was "man-made" but also that it resulted more fundamentally from the
"ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our
reluctance to question authority; our devotion to 'sticking with the program';
our groupism; and our insularity." Critics have argued that even Kurokawa
didn't go far enough; the report names no names, and critical elements that
appear in the English-language report didn't make it into the Japanese. But
his rare willingness to point fingers is exactly what may be needed to shake the
world's third-biggest economy out of its dangerous complacency.
Best idea:
Critical importance of human wisdom.
Worst idea:
Continuing greed.
Renewal.
Less.
To tweet.

64 DARON ACEMOGLU, JAMES ROBINSON
For showing it's politics that makes states fail.
Economist, political scientist | Cambridge, Mass.
It's fitting that in the year after the Arab Spring and the European debt crisis
dethroned one head of state after another, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu
and Harvard University political scientist James Robinson put out an
authoritative tome arguing, based on a sweeping historical survey stretching
back to the Neolithic age, that state failure stems not from culture, geography,
or insufficient technocratic expertise, but rather from what they call "extractive
institutions" -- those that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few
elites. "Poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices
that create poverty," the two write in Why Nations Fail. "They get it wrong
not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose."
In tackling one of history's most vexing questions -- why some countries
flourish while others flounder -- Acemoglu and Robinson argue that Mexico is
poorer than the United States because of the institutions established by
Spanish versus British colonialists, and that authoritarian China's current
economic growth is simply not sustainable. The duo has also launched a blog
to apply their thesis to everything from the eurozone crisis to sexual
repression in North Korea.
Along the way, Acemoglu and Robinson are making people think again (and
again) about geopolitics. "The more you read [Why Nations Fail], the more you
appreciate what a fool's errand we're on in Afghanistan and how much we need
to totally revamp our whole foreign aid strategy," New York Times columnist
Thomas Friedman marveled. "But most intriguing are the warning flares the
authors put up" about America's growing inequality and China's unsustainable
growth. They're danger signs world leaders would do well to heed.
ACEMOGLU
Reading list:
Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, by Laurent Dubois; Dancing
in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the
Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns; The Evolution of God,
by Robert Wright.
Best idea:
A growth pact for Europe.
Worst idea:
A growth pact for Europe based on just carrying on with business as
usual.
American renewal.
More.
Why not?
ROBINSON
Reading list:
Oblivion: A Memoir, by Hctor Abad Faciolince; Country of
Bullets: Chronicles of War, by Juanita Len; Antecedents to
Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom, by Jan Vansina.
Best idea:
To have the World Bank led by someone who actually has a track
record in solving the problems of poor people in developing countries.
Worst idea:
CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa)
as favored emerging markets.
Renewal.
More.
Not.
65 PAUL ROMER
For dreaming big about how to reinvent cities.
Back in 2009, Paul Romer began talking about "charter cities" -- his novel
idea for persuading a developing country to sign away a parcel of land to be
governed by a foreign power as a model for economic growth, essentially
creating mini-Hong Kongs throughout the Third World. The concept was
generally received as intriguing but infeasible. Free trade zones and low-cost
maquiladora factories are one thing, but what government would ever
voluntarily let another country enforce laws on its territory? It seemed like a
mix of wild-eyed futurism and old-school colonialism, and the one government
that seriously considered adopting it -- Madagascar's -- was overthrown in a
coup shortly afterward.
Then came Honduras. President Porfirio Lobo, who came to power following
his own country's coup in 2009, was intrigued by Romer's proposal, and over
the past two years, Honduras moved substantially toward enacting his dream,
even passing legislation establishing a Regin Especial de Desarrollo -- or RED
-- that would have special, market-friendly laws to attract international
investors. In a geographically bizarre arrangement, the court system of
Mauritius, a tiny island country in the Indian Ocean, was enlisted to serve as
the RED's appeals court. Still, big dreams don't come easily. In September,
Romer resigned from the project's advisory board after the Honduran
government signed an investment deal without the board's input. In October,
the Honduran Supreme Court ruled "private cities" unconstitutional. "I
don't know what people mean when they refer to private cities," Romer told
the Guardian before the decision. "But if it suggests that there will be no
institutions or government, then I fear that misses the essential requirement
for successful urbanization."
Whether or not the Honduran Hong Kong ever materializes, Romer deserves
credit for showing the power of even an outlandish idea to make us reimagine
the world's poorest places.

66 ALEXANDER MACGILLIVRAY
For defending free speech in the Twitter era.
General counsel, Twitter | San Francisco
With last year's Arab uprisings, the world saw the power of Twitter to channel
popular sentiment, mobilize protests, and even, some argued, topple dictators.
That power isn't always a given, however, and it's Alexander Macgillivray's job
to defend it. As Twitter's head lawyer, he has done battle with governments
across the globe to protect the right of tweeps everywhere to spout off --
provided, of course, they do it in 140 characters or less.
In just the past year, the longtime Silicon Valley attorney, who previously
represented Google as it redefined intellectual property law for the search era,
has contested attempts by the Indian government to shut down accounts,
fought a U.S. court order to release data on Occupy Wall Street protesters, and
even reprimanded a fellow Twitter employee for helping the company's
corporate partners silence critical voices on the site. "You don't want business
interests affecting judgment about content," Macgillivray insisted. "It's against
the trust your users have in your service."
But it's a tricky balancing act. Early this year, Twitter announced a new policy
giving the company the ability to "reactively withhold content from users in a
specific country -- while keeping it available in the rest of the world."
(Removing a tweet previously meant deleting it from the web entirely.) Critics
said the move was a form of censorship, but Twitter promised tweets would be
removed only upon request and only if they broke the law -- a system that
Macgillivray, one of the policy's architects, defended as a way "to keep more
tweets up in more places." The company refused to comply with all six
government removal requests in the first half of 2012, but in October Twitter
blocked access in Germany to the account of a neo-Nazi group that is banned
by the German government, in addition to removing anti-Semitic tweets in
France. "Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly &
transparently," Macgillivray tweeted.
The microblogging service may still be figuring out the kinks of this new policy,
but at a time when multinational corporations are caving left and right to
countries like China, Macgillivray's principled defense of free speech is vital.
"No one wants a pen that's going to rat them out," he told the New York Times.
"We all want pens that can be used to write anything and that will stand up for
who we are."
67 RUCHIR SHARMA
For dusting the gold off the term "emerging markets."
Managing director, Morgan Stanley | New York
In 2008, the crash of Lehman Brothers sent the world economy into a tailspin.
Four years later, the United States and the major economies of the European
Union are growing anemically, if at all. The investing world has seen the Chinas
and Indias as practically the only bright spots of global growth. According to
Ruchir Sharma, however, the golden age for these up-and-comers is fast
coming to a close.
In his new book, Breakout Nations, Sharma -- who oversees a portfolio
worth an estimated $25 billion -- debunks the conventional wisdom that the
emerging markets of the last decade will continue to drive global growth in the
next one. Where some see in India, Mexico, and Russia's growing ranks of
billionaires symbols of newfound affluence, Sharma sees dangerous
imbalances. Smart investors should look instead to a new class of promising
economies -- like "boring" Poland. Sharma's smart geoeconomic insights --
like his riff on how overpriced cocktails in Rio could be a sign of green shoots in
Detroit or his take on why China's slowdown won't be the "cataclysmic event"
that many fear (after all, "a dead camel is still larger than a horse") -- are the
end product of two decades of traveling the world to seek out ground truth for
himself. "The next decade is full of bright spots," Sharma writes, "but you can't
find them by looking back at the nations that got the most hype in the last
decade."
Reading list:
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the
Essential in Business and in Life, by Leo Babauta; Joseph
Anton: A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie; The Quest: Energy,
Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel
Yergin.
Best idea:
The abundance of oil.
Worst idea:
Another marketing acronym for which countries will do well: MIST
(Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey).
American renewal.
Less.
Not to tweet.

68 CHINUA ACHEBE
For forcing Africa to confront its demons.
Author | Providence, R.I.
A giant of contemporary African letters for more than half a century, Chinua
Achebe is still best known for his 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, which drew
on oral traditions to tell the story of a Nigerian village transformed by
colonialism and Western-imposed Christianity. He also achieved renown for
his withering critiques of depictions of Africa by European writers, demanding
a literature that traveled well beyond the Heart of Darkness clichs to reveal
African realities, while urging Africans to be the ones to tell their own stories.
True to that appeal, this year brought Achebe's own powerful memoir, There
Was a Country, an account of his life during the 1967-1970 Biafran war.
Achebe had taken the Biafran side in the conflict, which left more than 1
million people dead, and served as a roving international ambassador for the
breakaway government, narrowly escaping Nigerian attacks on multiple
occasions. His book makes the case that the Biafran war -- Africa's first civil war
to generate major international media attention -- was a harbinger of African
conflicts to come, from Rwanda to Congo to Sierra Leone, all of which have
their roots in the arbitrary drawing of borderlines during colonialism, were
exacerbated by natural resources, and proved the inability of the international
community to stop the bloodshed. "Nigeria was once a land of great hope and
progress, a nation with immense resources at its disposal," writes Achebe,
today a professor of Africana studies at Brown University. "But the Biafran war
changed the course of Nigeria. In my view it was a cataclysmic experience that
changed the history of Africa."
69 MA JUN
For dreaming of blue skies over China -- and working to make them.
Environmentalist | China
Sludge flows through China's rivers. The air tastes like glue. Synthetic eggs and
pigs pumped full of growth hormones and cooked in oil made of recycled
sewage feature on menus across the country. In the United States, asking "Why
is the sky blue?" implies something so obvious that it doesn't have to be
explained. But in China, home to some of the world's most polluted cities, the
question's very premise is questionable.
Enter Ma Jun, the most prominent Chinese activist attempting not only to hold
the government accountable but, first, to get it to tell the truth about just how
dire China's pollution problem really is. His method: diligently and
painstakingly collecting evidence of companies behaving badly to try to shame
them into compliance. A journalist turned environmentalist who founded the
Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, Ma applies
scientific rigor to exposing such corporate violations (more than 90,000 to
date), flagging everything from a small coal-tar factory improperly storing
its dangerous waste to Apple suppliers poisoning workers with a toxic chemical
used on touch screens -- as well as local governments that flout environmental
regulations across China. Dozens of major multinationals now consult Ma's
pollution readings when working with suppliers in China. And by documenting
environmental violations that had long been obvious but were never compiled
in a way the public could easily understand, Ma has given statistical
ammunition to Chinese citizens trying to nudge the Communist Party into
cleaning up its act.
Ma has pushed his message with vivid depictions of China's black rivers and
dun-colored heavens. In one recent article titled "A Dream of Blue Skies," Ma
writes of waiting for the day when "hospitals aren't filled with children suffering
from respiratory diseases when you don't have to think hard to choose the
type of dustproof mask so that they can walk home from school without
breathing in too much soot and exhaust." He might be waiting for a long time,
but it won't be for lack of trying.
70 YEVGENIA CHIRIKOVA
For outsmarting Vladimir Putin, one tree at a time.
Environmentalist | Russia
Yevgenia Chirikova had never been involved in politics before 2007, when she
noticed red paint on the trees of the Khimki forest outside Moscow, where she
enjoyed taking walks with her family. When she learned that a wide swath of
the forest was due to be razed for the construction of a highway, she did
something almost inconceivable in Russian political culture: She got organized.
A successful businesswoman with her own engineering company, Chirikova
soon proved an effective activist, organizing protests and blogging her struggle
to save the forest. When thousands of people began attending the rallies and
celebrities including U2's Bono began speaking out on her behalf, the Russian
state fought back. Chirikova was jailed multiple times, and at one point officials
threatened to take away her children on trumped-up neglect charges. The
Khimki protests were an early sign of the growing levels of dissent in Russia,
which boiled over into the massive rallies held before, and after, Vladimir
Putin's reelection this year. And Chirikova, who helped organize the protests
and recently challenged the ruling United Russia party in local elections (she
lost, but alleged voter fraud), was way ahead of the curve. During the Putin era,
the public faces of the Russian opposition have typically been intellectuals, ex-
politicians, or tycoons. With Chirikova, who runs her campaign out of a tiny
basement beside a fruit and vegetable store, Russian activists have a more
accessible symbol: an ordinary woman with unusual determination fighting to
save her home.
Reading list:
Anton Chekhov short stories and novels (reread); Hot, Flat, and
Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It
Can Renew America, by Thomas Friedman.
Best idea:
Preserving the view from your own window, the small motherland each
of us has.
Renewal. Smart America will realize it is time to walk away from the
idea of consuming society and become a responsible society.
More.
To tweet.
Chirikova tells FP:
"Before the Arab revolutions, many lived with the stereotype that
poverty pushes people to street protests. The Arab Spring
demonstrated that even when people do not starve, they still go to
protest, because they are unhappy about the regimes in their
countries. If they can do it, why cannot we? We saw that the square can
be real, that we also can come out and demand changes. Before, people
were too scared to demonstrate their views. Since last winter, our
squares have filled up with people demanding Putin's resignation,
demanding political changes."
"I am against revolutions. We have had negative experience with coups
and rallies in the past. We remember the shooting at the White House
in Moscow. We still mourn dozens of victims. The new Russia's protest
is the most beautiful, most peaceful, most intelligent protest in the
world -- not a single broken window, not a single burned car or victim."

71 RAND PAUL
For telling America to come home.
Senator | Washington
In the years since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Republican Party's base
has grown increasingly wary of engagement overseas -- to the point where
Republican primary voters in 2012 were split straight down the middle
about whether the United States should intervene in world affairs whenever
America's interests are challenged. And since 2010, when he rode the Tea Party
wave to Washington, Rand Paul has quickly emerged as the standard-bearer
for his party's noninterventionist wing. The freshman senator from Kentucky -
- son of libertarian leader Ron Paul, the congressman who waved the come-
home-America flag as an also-ran in this year's Republican presidential
primaries -- has called for a "foreign policy of moderation" that "works within
the confines of the Constitution and the realities of our fiscal crisis." He has
also argued that a "more defensive foreign policy" is in the long-term interest
of a Republican Party whose support is increasingly concentrated in the
American South. "I think that would go over much better in New England than
the typical 'we have to bomb everybody tomorrow' policy that you hear some
Republicans have."
In practice, these views have translated into opposition to the Patriot Act,
military intervention in Libya, aggressive rhetoric against Iran, and
increases in defense spending. This year, Paul also held up a government-
funding bill and several ambassadorial confirmations in an effort to cut foreign
aid to Egypt, Libya, and Pakistan. "We send billions of taxpayer dollars abroad
and what do we get in return?" he asked in September after the deadly attack
on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. "Disrespect, disdain and, ultimately,
violence." Plenty of Americans are starting to agree.
72 SRI MULYANI INDRAWATI
For making the Indonesian Miracle, and taking it international.
Managing director, World Bank | Washington
As Indonesia's finance minister from 2005 to 2010, Sri Mulyani Indrawati won
high praise for tough-minded reforms -- from dismissing corrupt tax officials to
nearly quadrupling the roll of income-tax payers -- that helped the country of
250 million beat back the global financial crisis with annual growth rates
averaging 6 percent. Now that she's a managing director at the World Bank
(and its most senior woman), Sri Mulyani is peddling her wares to the rest of
the world, offering advice on economic growth for those countries hoping to
replicate the Indonesian miracle.
Her prescription is simple: sensible fiscal cutbacks plus policies that encourage
growth -- the tried-and-true methods of breaking down barriers to trade,
investment, and innovation. At a March speech in Beijing, for instance, she
cautioned that China's rise could be in jeopardy unless it allowed more, and
more equal, competition. In a bit of role reversal for an official from a former
Dutch colony, Sri Mulyani has also dispensed words of wisdom to debt-saddled
Europe: Countries like Greece and Spain should get their balance sheets in
order and then worry about building up their economies, she says -- but the
two go hand in hand. Call it the Indonesian model.
Sri Mulyani has good reason to put her country on a pedestal: Indonesia has
the world's third-fastest-growing consumer base after China and India, and it
is predicted to surpass the likes of Britain and Germany to become the world's
seventh-largest economy by 2030. So forget the BRICS, she says, and find a
way to put another "I" on the list of the world's most successful emerging
economies.

73 WANG JISI
For telling us what China really thinks about America.
Dean, School of International Studies, Peking University | China
The foreign policy of the world's No. 2 superpower remains a bit of a mystery.
Chinese leaders rarely elaborate or take questions in news conferences, instead
offering canned statements to Communist Party propaganda outlets such as
the People's Daily. And lower-ranking Chinese officials and think-tank experts
are far more constrained in their ability to explain what's really going on than
their voluble U.S. counterparts.
That's why Wang Jisi, China's most respected expert on the United States, is
so crucial to understanding what Chinese leaders think about the world. A
gifted writer and the former director of the Institute of International Strategic
Studies at the Central Party School, the most prestigious training institution for
Communist Party officials, Wang has both the ability and, crucially, the
permission to demystify Chinese views. What does Wang want us to know?
That the feel-good stories U.S. officials tell themselves about China's global
ascent are an elaborate form of denial. In an influential monograph co-
authored by Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Lieberthal, Wang this
year described China's actions on the world stage as rooted in the conclusion
that "America will seek to constrain or even upset China's rise." Beijing's view,
he says, is that the United States is "heading for decline" and that China's
development model provides an "alternative to Western democracy and market
economies." The result? "[T]hese views make many Chinese political elites
suspect that it is the United States," Wang says, "that is 'on the wrong side of
history.'"
74 RAJ CHETTY
For following the numbers -- wherever they lead.
How much is a good fourth-grade teacher worth? Enough to pack an extra
apple with your kid's lunch? Or maybe a nice gift for the holidays? How about
$700,000? That figure, it turns out, is the amount of extra income the
students of an average-sized U.S. classroom, combined, can earn over their
lifetimes thanks to a good fourth-grade teacher. If that sounds excessive, Raj
Chetty, a Harvard University economist, has the numbers to back it up -- just
one of this 33-year-old's pioneering, empirical discoveries in his short career so
far.
The Indian-American Chetty, who earned tenure at Harvard at the tender age
of 29 and is a winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant this year, has been
bucking the conventional economic wisdom since he was an undergraduate,
also at Harvard. As a sophomore, he caught the eye of legendary economist
Martin Feldstein (No. 52) by proposing a counterintuitive reason that
companies might increase investment under higher interest rates; Feldstein
told Chetty to quit working for him and instead pursue his own research. Since
then, Chetty -- driven by the simple impulse for "math to guide the intuition,
not for the intuition to guide the math," as he has put it -- has managed to
overturn various age-old assumptions and ensure his place at the center of the
U.S. policy debate over everything from unemployment benefits (they're
not necessarily a crutch -- they give people time to find well-suited jobs) to tax
breaks (one of their most important qualities, it turns out, is that beneficiaries
actually know how they work). With an already hefty list of findings like these,
Chetty is at the forefront of the growing field of behavioral public finance, using
hard data to track how economic policy affects individual behavior and social
welfare. It may sound simple, but, as Feldstein once put it, most economists
today are "happy to take the data as they find it." That's just what makes
Chetty's novel, truth-testing experiments, in Feldstein's words, "ingenious."

75 ASGHAR FARHADI
For his eloquent case for coexistence.
Filmmaker | Iran
Weeks after Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called Israel a
"cancer tumor" in the latest rhetorical salvo of hatred from the leaders of the
Islamic Republic, Asghar Farhadi presented a decidedly different portrait of
their country. Accepting the Academy Award for best foreign film in a gilded
Hollywood theater, he spoke of peace and tolerance, reminding tens of
millions of viewers worldwide that "at the time when talk of war, intimidation,
and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country,
Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture
that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics."
Farhadi's carefully chosen words avoided outright criticism of the Iranian
regime. (And for good reason: Fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi was
sentenced to six years in prison and banned from filmmaking for 20 years
after speaking out in support of Iran's 2009 opposition protests.) Yet, precisely
by sidestepping the overtly political -- by depicting "the way that millions of
normal people live in Iran today," as the lead actor put it -- Farhadi's Oscar-
winning film, A Separation, reminded us how art can transcend nationalism.
The story of a Tehran couple's split -- which arises from a clash over how to
raise their daughter but blows up after a violent incident, setting off a complex
legal imbroglio -- had decidedly Iranian trappings, broaching questions about
Islam and the treatment of women. At its core, though, the film's appeal proved
universal. In a year when Iran and Israel seemed to grow more aggressive by
the day, Farhadi elegantly articulated the basic shared humanity of peoples
across borders, even on the brink of war.
76 ADELA NAVARRO BELLO
For telling the world about the drug war's brutal reality.
Journalist | Mexico
The reports from Mexico are all too familiar: another journalist who has been
killed, the latest victim of that country's protracted drug war. The means are as
grisly as they are varied, but the reason is nearly always the same -- a
willingness to report on cartel violence and corruption in the Mexican
government. As a result, self-censorship has become rampant among
journalists across Mexico, but Adela Navarro Bello is a striking exception. The
editor of the Tijuana weekly Zeta, Navarro leads one of the few remaining
publications that prides itself on investigative work into the drug war and the
associated miasma of corruption and incompetence. For Navarro and her staff,
the stakes could hardly be higher. In 1988, the magazine's co-founder, Hctor
Flix Miranda, was shot and killed, and in 2004, co-editor Francisco Ortiz
Franco was murdered. Since 2006, when President Felipe Caldern came to
office and unleashed the official campaign against the country's cartels, at least
40 Mexican journalists have been murdered or disappeared in a conflict that
has killed at least 50,000 -- more than the number of American combat deaths
in the Vietnam War. Navarro's magazine practices a kind of journalism both
essential and extremely dangerous -- she's following the money. "They say
Chapo Guzmn [Mexico's most powerful cartel boss] is worth a billion dollars,"
she said in a recent interview. "Where is that money? Where are their
investments?" In Navarro, who travels with two bodyguards, Mexicans have
found a rare reporter brave enough to keep asking the right questions.
Reading list:
The Invention of Solitude, by Paul Auster; To Each His Own, by
Leonardo Sciascia; Confessions of a Young Novelist, by Umberto
Eco.
Best idea:
Rich people paying more taxes.
Worst idea:
Restricting Internet content.

77 NITISH KUMAR
For turning around India's poorest state.
Chief minister, Bihar | India
Like Haiti, Somalia, and Mississippi, India's Bihar state has been called many
unflattering names; it's often referred to as the country's "bleakest state" and
the "jungle Raj" for its colonial levels of poverty and corruption. Many viewed
it as one of the most dysfunctional corners of a country world famous for
government dysfunction. Much of that began to change, however, when a low-
key bureaucrat from a local center-left party, Nitish Kumar, won the 2005
election and set out to clean up a wasteland where 100 million people are
squeezed into a territory smaller than Arkansas.
In his two terms in office, he has done just that, relying on an array of
innovative programs to crack down on crime, shame corrupt public officials,
and boost economic development. In addition to setting up a special fast-track
court system to move trials along more quickly, Kumar's administration has
offered cash rewards to whistleblowers and has broadcast bribery complaints
on YouTube. A law passed last year allows the government to take control of ill-
gotten land and, unless the owner is cleared in court, use it for schools and
health clinics. He has overseen the construction of nearly 15,000 schools, hired
150,000 new teachers, launched a program to give free bikes to girls so they
can get to class, and distributed free radios to lower-caste citizens to "listen to
music, news, and improve your areas of information," as he put it. With crime
rates finally plummeting and education rates rising, there's no question these
efforts have paid off. In 2011, Indian economists Bibek Debroy and Laveesh
Bhandari called Bihar India's least corrupt state, and this year the state's
service- and agriculture-based economy was the country's fastest-growing for
the second year in a row (this while India's national economy is waning and,
with it, enthusiasm for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh). Although Kumar
says he's not a candidate to replace Singh, he is now being floated as a
potential prime minister for 2014. Quite a leap for the leader of a region once
decried as a "criminal fiefdom."
When the Tor Project was announced a decade ago, Google was still largely
seen as fulfilling its corporate motto, "Don't be evil," and Twitter didn't even
exist. But researchers Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson
could already see trouble on the horizon. Created in a U.S. naval lab to
safeguard government communications, their brainchild the Tor Project (which
stands for "the onion router") is designed to protect anyone and everyone from
the dangers of Big Brother. The free software, now relied on by hundreds of
thousands of users daily, bounces information through the computers of
3,000 volunteers around the world, hiding the identity of the original user.
Operated by just 15 full-time employees with a budget just over $1 million,
thanks to grants from the U.S. State Department and the National Science
Foundation, Tor allows people who otherwise might be silenced online --
whether corporate whistleblowers or domestic-violence victims -- to bring
important information to light. It has become an especially critical tool over the
last two years as activists and journalists from Bahrain to Syria find themselves
the targets of increasingly tech-savvy tyrants. "We developed Tor originally
with civil liberties in mind," Dingledine told an interviewer. "We want to let
people in free countries be able to communicate and secure their
communications so they can keep their freedoms." Bit by bit, it's working.
DINGLEDINE
Reading list:
Kallocain, by Karin Boye; Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay;
Blindsight, by Peter Watts.
Best idea:
Holding Western corporations accountable for selling censorship and
surveillance tools to dictators.
Worst idea:
Bloggers shouldn't get the First Amendment protections that
journalists do.
Decline, unless we can solve the corporate influence on our
government.
Either, but pick one.
Feel free.
MATHEWSON
Reading list:
Homestuck (webcomic in progress), by Andrew Hussie; The Better
Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker; Overcoming Bias
(blog).
Best idea:
Cryptoparties, though the execution still needs work.
Worst idea:
The constellation of anti-democratic speech regulations and
surveillance proposals operating under the names of "Internet safety,"
"copyright enforcement," and the like.
That's up to us, isn't it?
Some of each; European unity is not a single axis.
Yes, if you have a good number of 140-character ideas.

79 ELIOT COHEN
For writing the GOP's foreign-policy playbook in 2012.
Political scientist | Washington

It was Eliot Cohen, the former State Department counselor and Pentagon
advisor, who first laid out Mitt Romney's vision for a bolder, more self-assured
American foreign policy -- one that the bow-tied Johns Hopkins University
professor contrasted with President Barack Obama's call to focus on "nation-
building here at home."
"The United States cannot withdraw from world affairs without grave danger to
itself and to others," Cohen warned in an October 2011 white paper for
Romney's presidential campaign. Above all, the United States must not look
"weak and uncertain," he wrote -- a theme the candidate would earnestly take
up on the stump. As for Obama, Cohen accused him of "currying favor with our
enemies."
For Cohen, the role of the presidency itself was at stake. The leading military
strategist, whose 2002 book, Supreme Command, made it onto President
George W. Bush's reading list in the lead-up to the Iraq war, has long touted
strategic vision and strong, hands-on leadership from the White House during
wartime. He is perhaps best known for defying the conventional wisdom that
presidents, once they've given the order to go to war, should leave the strategic
planning to their generals. Romney may have lost despite touting the need to
restore "strong, confident, principled global leadership," but you haven't heard
the last of Cohen and his argument.
Reading list:
Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by
Christopher Andrew; Essays, by William Hazlitt; Thinking, Fast
and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.
Best idea:
Philip Tetlock's finding that political experts tend to be systematically
less correct in their predictions than the proverbial chimp throwing
darts.
Worst idea:
That we should consider suppressing free speech at home to mollify
Salafi mobs abroad.
Depends on what Americans choose.
The more of an artificially unified European polity, the less there will
be of a Europe worth having.
Not on your life. At a time when we read less widely and deeply, and
write less cleverly and precisely than in previous times, why make
ourselves even more vapid than we already are?
80 RAGHURAM RAJAN
For saving India from its politicians.
Economist | India
In the United States, where Raghuram Rajan lived and worked for years as a
professor at the University of Chicago and chief economist at the IMF, he is
known primarily as one of the guys who saw it coming. In a 2005 paper --
widely derided by his colleagues at the time -- Rajan warned that financial
markets were encouraging irresponsible speculation that could lead to a major
crash. He would be vindicated three years later. In the past year, Rajan has
argued against "the standard Keynesian line" that governments can simply
borrow and spend their way out, urging the West to "treat the crisis as a wake-
up call to fix what debt has papered over."
Now, Rajan is bringing his know-how to his most challenging assignment yet:
saving the world's largest democracy from economic ruin. In August, he
accepted the post of chief economic advisor to the Finance Ministry in his
native India at a time when the country's GDP is slowing and deficits are
beginning to spiral out of control. Rajan argues that India has been coasting off
the dividends from economic reforms passed in the 1990s as its politicians have
gotten lazy, giving away government funding to politically influential groups
while failing to make the investments in energy and infrastructure that could
help India reach the next level of growth. As his appointment suggests, Rajan's
views are increasingly becoming the conventional wisdom. Winning the
argument is one thing, though -- getting India's entrenched political interests
to do something about it may prove another matter entirely.
Reading list:
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, by Robert
Caro; Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman; A Game of Thrones, by
George R.R. Martin.

81 PATRICE MARTIN, JOCELYN WYATT
For redesigning the war on poverty.
Directors, IDEO.org | San Francisco
The design world has long been preoccupied with dreaming up ever sleeker
cars, laptops, smartphones, and even kitchen gadgets. But Patrice Martin and
Jocelyn Wyatt are at the forefront of a hip new field fashioning decidedly less
glamorous -- if all the more consequential -- systems and devices aimed not at
the world's yuppies but at those left out of the design revolution.
Martin is creative director and Wyatt executive director of IDEO.org, a spinoff
of the design firm IDEO that brings engineering and marketing innovations to
poor communities throughout the world. The idea: Put Silicon Valley's brains
and money toward tackling development challenges from sanitation to
agriculture, financial services to gender equality. In Kenya, where only 61
percent of the population has access to clean water, IDEO.org came up with a
subscription home-delivery system -- designing everything from the shape and
look of the water containers to a stylish logo to help market the service, now
being piloted in Nairobi. "The solutions that we come up with, we really try to
make tangible," Wyatt explained. Part of the goal, she says, is "storytelling" --
offering simple, visual explanations of their new designs, whether it's an in-
home toilet system in Ghana or kitchen accessories to make Tanzanians'
cookstoves easier to use.
Wyatt, a development expert, is the business brains behind IDEO.org, and
Martin is the artist. Together, they're turning Silicon Valley's eye for elegance
toward the needs of the poor. The wealthy have Apple iPads to handle their
information overload and Herman Miller ergonomic chairs for their aching
backs. Why not apply design thinking -- which Wyatt calls "inherently
optimistic, constructive, and experiential" -- to the world's messier problems
too?
MARTIN
Reading list:
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; What Is the
What, by Dave Eggers; Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.
Best idea:
Coca-Cola and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria partnering to leverage Coca-Cola's distribution systems for
medicine delivery in Tanzania.
Worst idea:
The offensive YouTube video, Innocence of Muslims.
Renewal.
More Europe.
Tweet.
WYATT
Reading list:
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight
Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo; The Lean
Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous
Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric
Ries; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.
Best idea:
Slavery Footprint's Made in a Free World platform for businesses
to eradicate forced labor in their supply chains.
Worst idea:
Mitt Romney's Big Bird comments and suggestion to cut PBS
funding.
American renewal.
More.
Tweet.
82 ROBERT D. KAPLAN
For putting geography back on the map.
Chief geopolitical analyst, Stratfor | Stockbridge, Mass.
Brutal dictators, sectarian divisions, political repression. These are among the
messy and unpredictable causes oft cited for modern-day conflicts. Robert D.
Kaplan reminds us that other, more elemental factors are still often at play:
mountains, rivers, even soil types. As he writes in his ambitious new book, The
Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming
Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, topography and borders (or lack
thereof) are inseparable from geopolitics -- from the "utterly porous" frontier
fatefully linking troubled Afghanistan and Pakistan to the vast natural
resources spanning China and Russia, whose proximity "commands a
perennially tense relationship."
In 1993, Kaplan, then a globe-trotting Atlantic correspondent, skyrocketed to
fame when President Bill Clinton reportedly read his gloomy third book,
Balkan Ghosts. (Presidential aides said it helped convince Clinton against
initially intervening in the Balkans.) Flash forward 17 years and 11 more books.
Kaplan predicted in his 2010 book, Monsoon, that the Indian Ocean would
"demographically and strategically be a hub of the twenty-first-century world,"
a view that caught the attention of Barack Obama's administration as it weighed
a strategic "pivot" to Asia and one that looks more and more ahead of the curve
as global power continues to shift from northern landmasses to southern seas.
Now, in The Revenge of Geography, Kaplan synthesizes his canon of
geographic writings to show how landscapes and climates still shape our world.
He links America's failures in the Iraq war (which he initially backed) to a
misunderstanding of Iraq's desert landscape and "terrain-specific" militias,
and he argues it's no coincidence that last year's Arab democracy protests
began in one of the North African countries closest to Europe. Most
controversial (at least among the "liberal humanists," whom, Kaplan warns,
he will make "profoundly uneasy") is his revival of early 20th-century
geographers like Halford Mackinder, whose theory that control of Central Asia
"is the pivot on which the fate of great world empires rests" was infamously
adopted and distorted by the Nazis to justify their idea of Lebensraum. Kaplan's
book is not only the definitive account of geography in modern history, but the
most convincing argument in recent memory for its centrality in foreign policy
today.
Reading list:
The Second Nuclear Age, by Paul Bracken; God's Playground:
A History of Poland, by Norman Davies; The Better Angels of
Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.
Best idea:
We need to return to the bipartisan realism of the likes of the elder
Bush administration.
Worst idea:
Obama is a foreign-policy disaster.
Both.
Both, as the EU will compete with Russia and Turkey for influence in
Central Europe and the Balkans.
If we could all only stop.

83 KAI-FU LEE
For building the new Chinese Internet.
CEO and chairman, Innovation Works | China
Despite growing into the world's second-largest economy in 2011, China is still
most often dismissed as a manufacturer rather than an innovator, a
borrower rather than a creator. The man most likely to guarantee that China
becomes a pioneer and not merely a pirate is Kai-Fu Lee, the Taiwanese-
American former head of Google China and a tech guru who manages China's
most prominent venture-capital fund and whose koan-like pronouncements
on everything from start-ups to sports are eagerly lapped up by his millions of
online followers.
In an effort to replicate the successes of Silicon Valley, Lee has raised more
than $600 million and invested in more than 50 companies since he started his
firm, Innovation Works, in 2009; he also hosts educational programs and
incubators for promising Chinese entrepreneurs. His companies include
Zhihu, a question-and-answer-based "social knowledge network";
Wonderpod, which helps users sync their mobile and PC content; and Nevel,
a cloud-based service that optimizes websites while helping to protect them
from security breaches. With more than 33 million followers combined on
China's two most popular microblogging platforms, Lee is also a real-world
celebrity.
In an article he published on his LinkedIn page in October, Lee named
China's narrowly focused school curriculum and the risk-averse nature of
Chinese students, as well as the country's chaotic Internet environment,
among the reasons China hasn't yet produced its own Mark Zuckerberg. That
may be why he has also started a popular education website encouraging
Chinese students to think more creatively. Although none of his companies has
exploded yet, Lee's ultimate contribution may be more fundamental: laying
both the intellectual and financial groundwork for a revolution in the world's
largest online community.
Reading list:
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson; The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries;
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, by Ezra
Vogel.
American renewal, because American innovation cannot be challenged
yet.
Less Europe.
To tweet, but people need more expressiveness than 140 characters.
Chinese people tweet about five times more information in 140
Chinese characters, and the quality, usage, and impact show the
difference.
84 BETH NOVECK
For demanding open government, then creating it.
Law professor | New York
When U.S. President Barack Obama issued a memorandum on his first full
day in office to make government more transparent and open, it was no
coincidence he tapped Beth Noveck to lead the unprecedented initiative.
Noveck, an open-government pioneer who made a cause of crowdsourcing
experts to help the overloaded U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review all
those innovative patent applications, not only took the job, but she used it to
draft open-government rules for federal agencies with input from Internet
users and launch data.gov, which, to date, has published nearly 400,000
government data sets that fuel roughly 1,500 apps on everything from
product recalls to national obesity trends. Her goal, she said in an
interview, was sweeping: to "use new technology to hard-wire this kind of
reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can't be
undone in the next administration."
Now back in academia, Noveck continues to experiment with how data and
technology can revolutionize democracy. She has advised British Prime
Minister David Cameron on open government ("Beth literally wrote the book,
Wiki Government, on how policymaking needs to change in the Internet
age," George Osborne, chancellor of the Exchequer, noted in announcing the
hire), founded a "do tank" that has developed ideas like virtual town-hall
forums, and prototyped OrgPedia, a Wikipedia-esque platform for data on
corporations.
Open government isn't built in a day, or one presidential term, for that matter.
But if the initiatives she has set in motion -- from the National Archives
dashboard for citizen archivists to the Department of Health and Human
Services website for comparing insurance options -- are any indication,
Noveck has arguably done more than anyone to lay the foundations for a
Washington that feels less like a cloistered village and more like an online
public square.
Reading list:
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway; Future Perfect: The
Case for Progress in a Networked Age, by Steven Johnson;
Honeybee Democracy, by Thomas Seeley.
Best idea:
The National Endowment for the Arts should become more like
Kickstarter.
Worst idea:
That Kickstarter should replace the National Endowment for the Arts.
American reinvention.
More innovative European cities. Less agile and capable nation-states.
Early and often: @bethnoveck.

85 RADOSLAW SIKORSKI
For telling the truth, even when it's not diplomatic.
Foreign minister | Poland
As the only country in the European Union that never went into recession,
Poland has a unique vantage point on Europe's economic woes. And Foreign
Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has taken up the mission of delivering hard truths
to governments that need to hear it.
In a speech late last year, Sikorski shocked his Berlin audience by saying, "I
fear German power less than I am beginning to fear its inactivity" -- a near-
historic statement given the long past enmity between the two countries. In an
op-ed, he described the prospect of a eurozone breakup as a "crisis of
apocalyptic proportions" and demanded that Germany, as one of the prime
beneficiaries of European integration, take greater action to help the rest of the
continent escape the crisis. In September, Sikorski turned up the pressure on
Britain, demanding that David Cameron's government take a greater interest in
European leadership. "The EU is an English-speaking power. The single
market was a British idea," he said. "You could, if only you wished, lead
Europe's defense policy. But if you refuse, please don't expect us to help you
wreck or paralyze the EU."
A onetime journalist married to Washington Post columnist Anne
Applebaum, Sikorski is a staunch advocate of transatlantic cooperation to
tackle security threats -- particularly an increasingly belligerent Russia.
Although he has credited Poland's own 2007 "reset" with Russia with paving
the way for the policy of Barack Obama's administration, Sikorski now warns
of Russian President Vladimir Putin's ever-creeping authoritarianism. Nor is
Sikorski, who has close ties to Washington hawks, always impressed with the
current occupant of the Oval Office: In May, when Obama made an offhand
reference to a "Polish death camp," rather than calling it a Nazi death camp
located in Poland, Sikorski tweeted that the remark was evidence of
"ignorance and incompetence."
Reading list:
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, by Anne
Applebaum; Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies.
Best idea:
Rewarding bankers in proportion to capital they create, rather than
debt.
Worst idea:
The UK leaving the EU.
Renewal, in a form of reinventing itself.
More.
To tweet, of course.
86 PANKAJ MISHRA
For charting the intellectual rise of the East -- without the West.
Writer | Britain
For Americans, world events inevitably come colored through a Western prism,
whether it's believing that the American ideal of democracy inspired the Arab
Spring or that China's economy will stall without opening more to the West.
And that's not surprising: The West dominated the 20th century, and today
nearly every society "seems at least partially Westernized, or aspiring towards a
form of Western modernity," as Pankaj Mishra writes in his provocative 2012
book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade
Asia. But Mishra reminds us, "there was a time when the West merely
denoted a geographical region, and other peoples unselfconsciously assumed a
universal order centered in their values."
Mishra, an Indian-born novelist and essayist, offers the rare ability to write
both knowledgeably and critically about the continent of his birth -- and for a
largely Western audience. At his day job, he pens columns for Bloomberg
View on Asia's shifting role in today's geopolitical climate. In From the Ruins of
Empire, he looks back at the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when much of
Asia was still wrestling with the ideological influence of its colonizers. The book
focuses on Liang Qichao, a Chinese reformer and early influence on Mao
Zedong who wrote -- in a line that might have been plucked from the 2012
news cycle -- about the risks and temptations of viewing China as the world, as
well as Persian ideologue Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who advocated pan-Islamic
"zeal" as the way to revive the Muslim world. If these unheralded thinkers were
better known, Mishra argues, the world might better understand Asia's rise
today. In Afghanistan, for instance, money and lives could have been saved,
Mishra says, "if the simple moral equations -- miniskirts versus Taliban beards"
were replaced with deeper intellectual engagement with the past. Binary
frameworks like this, he says, show just how unaware East and West are of
their history -- both shared and, more importantly, not.
87 TARIQ RAMADAN
For telling us that Islam and democracy can go together -- just when it
matters.
Scholar | Britain
In the wake of the Arab uprisings, which simultaneously swept Islamists to
power and brought new democracies into being in much of the Middle East,
Arab countries are grappling with how to reconcile Islamic tradition with
freedom, gender equality, and human rights -- ideas that many perceive as
alien imports from the West. These are precisely the questions with which
Tariq Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University and the
grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, has spent his
career wrestling. Islam, he argues, is not inherently anti-Western; the two can
be reconciled. Ramadan's aim is to reform minds, he is fond of saying, not
rewrite holy texts.
It's a message that resonates among migr populations in the West, but has
much to offer newly liberated Middle Eastern societies as well. In Islam and
the Arab Awakening, his controversial new book that infuriated some
because of its conspiracy-theorizing about the Western origins of the Arab
Spring, Ramadan challenges Muslims to embrace democracy on their own
terms, suggesting now is an excellent time for some "political creativity."
He's no mere cheerleader for street politics, though, acknowledging that
decades of oppressive dictatorship crippled "the life of ideas" in much of the
Arab world and demanding change rather than blind adherence to the past.
There can be, he says, "no faithfulness without evolution."
Reading list:
The Islamophobia Industry, by Nathan Lean; Spiritual Gems:
The Mystical Qur'an Commentary Ascribed by the Sufis to
Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, translated by Farhana Mayer; The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry.
Best and worst idea:
To run for the Egyptian presidency!
American decline.
More Europe.
To tweet.

88 JRGEN HABERMAS
For asking, what is Europe anyway?
Philosopher | Germany
Among a generation of gloomy 20th-century European philosophers who
sought to tear down reason and justice as instruments of oppression, Jrgen
Habermas long remained an intemperate optimist. He found his inspiration in
the coffeehouses and cafes of an earlier era in European history and, in 1981,
coined his most famous concept: communicative rationality, the idea that the
very process of talking and arguing produces agreement.
But the current crisis in Europe has beaten the optimism out of Habermas. He
has described European politicians' halting response to the mess as a creeping
coup d'tat that has put power in the hands of faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.
And as the eurozone economy imploded, the nationalism that the European
Union was supposed to suppress came roaring back, with parties across the
continent dabbling in a potent brew of racism and Islamophobia that has
turned right-wing extremism into a political growth industry. For the first time
in the EU's history, the 83-year-old Habermas told Der Spiegel, "we are
actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn't think this was
possible."
So what is this Europe whose decline Habermas so laments -- and how will it be
saved? In his new book, The Crisis of the European Union, Habermas
lays out a case for a more cosmopolitan Europe that more fully transcends its
national borders, where political power vested in an EU government elected by
the people of Europe would foster the kind of cross-border solidarity that the
crisis has so clearly exposed as lacking. It is a bold vision of a pan-European
democracy that would effectively end state sovereignty and foster a unity that
no market force could undermine. In a year of stifling incrementalism,
Habermas's ambitious vision is like a breath of fresh air.
89 RICKEN PATEL
For proving web activism doesn't have to begin and end with a click.
Executive director, Avaaz | New York
Ricken Patel has taken the fuzzy concept of a "global community" and given it
teeth. Avaaz, the civic organization he co-founded in 2007, has grown into the
world's largest web activism movement. Its more than 16 million members vote
on the organization's priorities and direct their donations in support of a wide
array of causes, from combating global warming to convincing the Hilton hotel
chain to train staff to spot guests trapped in prostitution. In harnessing the
Internet as a force for global change, Patel has disproved the notion that such
ventures are mere "clicktivism" and has pioneered a new model for advancing
human rights and democracy.
Patel, a Canadian who spent his career working as an analyst in conflict zones
such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, modeled Avaaz after the liberal advocacy
group MoveOn.org, but on a global scale. These days, however, Avaaz has
gone far beyond the usual roster of progressive causes, most notably with its
daring bid to play a direct role in Syria's civil war. Armed with millions of dollars
donated from supporters across the world, Patel's network has smuggled
medicine and communications equipment to activists inside the country and
helped with the evacuation of journalists from the besieged city of Homs. In
stark contrast to the international community, which has "been full of words
and light on actions," Patel said, "we've given concrete support and assistance."
Whether coordinating assistance in a guerrilla war or supporting gay rights in
Uganda, Patel says that Avaaz's ethos of transnational empowerment remains
the same. "There are two types of fatalism," he said. "The belief the world can't
change, and the belief you can't play a role in changing it."
Best idea:
Shift fossil fuel subsidies to the renewables sector.
Worst idea:
Saudi vision of expanded Gulf Cooperation Council to team up against
the Arab Spring.
American choice. Corrupt plutocratic decline or progressive democratic
renewal.
More! But of the right kind -- people-driven, people centered.
To each his own.

90 VIVEK WADHWA
For a fresh idea in the U.S. immigration debate.
Entrepreneur | Menlo Park, Calif.
Start-ups create jobs. Immigrants create start-ups. But immigrants have such a
difficult time entering the United States that for the first time in decades,
immigrant entrepreneurship has stalled. According to a study by entrepreneur
Vivek Wadhwa -- which he turned into a book this year, The Immigrant
Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture
Entrepreneurial Talent -- even as the number of immigrants in the United
States has risen, the percentage of immigrant-founded companies has hardly
budged from the 25 percent it was at in 2005; in Silicon Valley the numbers fell
from 52 percent to 44 percent. It's so bad that the start-up Blueseed is
planning to anchor a ship in international waters outside Silicon Valley so that
foreign entrepreneurs can live on the vessel and be closer to their investors and
clients without needing work visas. How can the United States hope to compete
in the 21st century, Wadhwa asks, without welcoming the world's best and
brightest?
An Indian-born U.S. citizen, Wadhwa is at the forefront of the movement to
institute what he calls a "start-up visa," through which entrepreneurs with
proven job creation and company size get fast-tracked for long-term visas.
Otherwise, Wadhwa says, the skilled immigrants will be long gone. "They'll be
back home building the next Googles and Intels in other countries, and we will
wake up five years from now and wonder how we let this happen," he says. It's
a wake-up call that post-recession America would do well to heed.
Reading list:
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter
Diamandis and Steven Kotler; Startup Communities: Building
an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld; The
Lean Startup, by Eric Ries.
Best idea:
Dean Kamen's "Slingshot" water purifier. With cheap, pure water, we
can dramatically reduce the incidence of disease and illness in the
developing world. And we can reduce the likelihood that wars will
break out over water shortages.
Worst idea:
When you live in Silicon Valley, you come across an abundance of bad
ideas. One idea is worse than the next! Entrepreneurs are still trying to
build more Facebooks and Twitters.
Major renewal. We live in the most innovative period in human
history.
The same.
Tweet or perish! Social media has become part of the fabric of modern
society. You need to be on it or be left out.
91 DANAH BOYD
For showing us that Big Data isn't necessarily better data.
Social media researcher | New York
The discussion of Big Data -- a buzzword for the proliferation of information
in the digital age and the technologies that have emerged to collect and analyze
it -- often centers on potential: the power of massive data sets to transform
government and revolutionize business, and even spell the "end of theory" in
the social sciences, as Wired's Chris Anderson boldly asserted. Federal
agencies from the CIA to the Defense Department have launched initiatives
based on the concept.
danah boyd (not a typo: she stripped her name of capital letters in 2000) has
done her share of data-mining too, studying the key role social media has
played in spreading information during the Arab Spring and Mexican drug
war. But, she warns, Big Data isn't necessarily better data. "Will large-scale
search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods?" boyd and a
co-author inquired in a paper this year. "Or will it usher in a new wave of
privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us
understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to
track protesters and suppress speech?" boyd worries about using data gathered
from sites like Facebook and Twitter just because it is accessible. She's also
concerned about the growing power gap between the many people who create
data (think Facebook's 1 billion users) and the few with the resources and the
power to establish rules governing its use (think Mark Zuckerberg). They're
questions we often forget to ask as we move more and more of our lives online,
but if we don't listen to visionaries like boyd, we may not like the answers so
much.
Reading list:
Communication Power, by Manuel Castells; Ready Player One,
by Ernest Cline; Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts
Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It, by Lawrence Lessig.
Best idea:
When mathematician Doug Muder wrote an essay on "privileged
distress," that was an aha moment for me. Privileged distress
describes the anxiety that privileged individuals feel when the cultural
norms that have benefited them start to shift, thereby undermining
their status even though they're not directly responsible for the
inequalities that gave them privilege in the first place.
Worst idea:
I am still dumbfounded that anyone could possibly believe that
raped women have biological mechanisms that prevent them from
getting pregnant and, therefore, any woman who does get pregnant
must have secretly enjoyed being raped.
Relative to other countries, American decline, but when measured
locally, American renewal.
I'm not sure what this even means. More European power? No.
More countries in the eurozone? Probably not. More European crises?
Definitely. More European influence on other countries? Perhaps in
some domains.
That is the question. I tweet, but not because I am. I tweet because I
am committed to the dissemination of information and the production
of knowledge in the hope that doing so will benefit others.

92 SLAVOJ ZIZEK
For giving voice to an era of absurdity.
Philosopher | Slovenia
With intellectual influences ranging from Karl Marx to French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the Matrix trilogy, Slavoj
Zizek has emerged over the past two decades as a modern rarity: a celebrity
philosopher, appearing everywhere from op-ed pages to cable-news debates to
your local art-house movie theater. At a time of capitalism in crisis, Zizek has
proved that the hard left can still offer valuable critiques of current events and
contemporary culture -- even as the left itself has often been the subject of his
withering criticism.
Zizek, who holds professorships at the University of Ljubljana and the
European Graduate School in Switzerland, is an almost absurdly prolific writer
of dozens of books, including four just this year on subjects ranging from the
global financial crisis to Hegel. He's perhaps better known, however, for his
agitated, rapid-fire public speeches. He's a favorite on the university speaking
circuit, not to mention the star of several feature-length documentaries,
including Zizek! and The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. It doesn't hurt that
he laces his arguments with frequent allusions to pop culture. Zizek is a self-
described communist but is probably a bit too misanthropic ("Humanity? Yes,
it's OK -- some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, 99 percent
are boring idiots.") to neatly fit into any particular ideology. He spoke at
Occupy Wall Street in its early days but later lost enthusiasm for the
movement, describing the New York Police Department's clearing of Zuccotti
Park as a "blessing in disguise."
With his flair for self-promotion and penchant for the deliberately outrageous -
- he has written that "the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent
enough" -- Zizek has led some critics to wonder whether he is more
performance artist than philosopher, a "Borat of philosophy," as he has
been called. But in an ever-more-absurd world, that might be just what we
need.
Reading list:
Logiques des Mondes, by Alain Badiou; Mourning Sickness:
Hegel and the French Revolution, by Rebecca Comay; Hegel's
Rabble, by Frank Ruda.
Best idea:
The big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.
Worst idea:
The nation-state is back. We should support it against the global
market.
Neither, things just dragging on.
More.
Not, loss of time.

93 MARTHA NUSSBAUM
For shining a light on the West's dark corners of intolerance.
Law and ethics professor | Chicago

In a year when an anti-Islam video sparked deadly protests across the Arab
world and a spate of violent incidents targeted minority groups in the United
States, Martha Nussbaum's new book offered a thoughtful, timely corrective to
the divisive dangers of religious intolerance, particularly Islamophobia.
Charting its rise and evolution in Europe and the United States since the 9/11
attacks -- from European laws prohibiting burqas in public to the uproar over a
proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York -- Nussbaum's The New
Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an
Anxious Age forcefully defends those whose religious freedoms have recently
been circumscribed or attacked.
An author and editor of dozens of books ranging over the big ideas of
everything from the Greek classics to feminism, Nussbaum brings a
philosopher's mind to an explosive political topic, pinpointing the roots of
religious fear as a fundamentally "narcissistic" emotion that dovetails with a
"visceral reaction against strangeness." Nussbaum, who converted to Judaism
in the 1960s and is the daughter of a Southern Protestant she admits was anti-
Semitic and racist, knows religious hatred firsthand. "When it's a minority that
dresses differently, that has different customs, people are afraid of that," she
explained in an interview this year. "It's easy for them to swallow some
paranoid fantasy."
Reading list:
Sailing on the Sea of Love, by Charles Capwell; Cry, the
Beloved Country, by Alan Paton; The Counterlife, by Philip Roth.
Best idea:
For me, the best ideas are always subtle and complicated ideas, and not
always new, so: John Rawls's idea of "political liberalism," Peter
Strawson's idea of the importance of the "reactive attitudes" in human
freedom, Rabindranath Tagore's proposal for a global culture of
imagination, emotion, and justice.
In the area of religious toleration, I hope for renewal; in the area of
social justice, I hope for renewal but predict decline; in the area of
education, similarly, I hope for renewal but am skeptical about
whether it will occur.
There never was a "Europe" in the sense of a unified political culture,
and we are now seeing the fruits of premature economic union without
political union.
I avoid all social media because they will devour all one's time if one
uses them, and I am fond of writing.

94 JOHN COATES
For exposing how biology affects Wall Street.
Neuroscientist | Britain
When John Maynard Keynes used the term "animal spirits" in 1936, he was
referring to the ways human hubris and fear can inflate profits and deepen
losses. But that is only part of the story. John Coates -- who ran a trading desk
at Deutsche Bank during the dot-com crisis and left Wall Street to become a
Cambridge University neuroscientist -- realized that his traders' responses to
big gains and losses were also driven by their physiology, an insight that is
changing our understanding of financial risk at a time when the actions of a
handful of traders can increasingly dictate the course of global markets.
Humans' innate fight-or-flight response, which primes the body for danger,
forms the basis for the kind of risky behavior that can drive big gains. But these
physical processes can also work against Wall Street traders. The title of
Coates's fascinating 2012 book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, refers
to a medieval French expression that describes the transformation in a man as
his testosterone level climbs and he is primed for a fight: He becomes cocky,
aggressive, and confident in his own superiority. These are qualities that have
helped humans overcome risky situations for millennia, but on Wall Street,
Coates argues, our primal instincts can backfire.
His research measuring traders' hormone levels, which has helped spur
newfound interest in the biology of risk, reveals that as profits mount,
testosterone levels increase, contributing to the irrational exuberance crucial to
a financial bubble. Conversely, when losses increase, a different hormone,
cortisol, begins to build up. That stress hormone contributes to the irrational
pessimism that can turn a market downturn into a full-fledged crash. The
solution, Coates suggests, is simple: Hire more women and older men on
trading floors and end the practice of massive bonuses for short-term profits.
"If we want to understand how people make financial decisions, how traders
and investors react to volatile markets," Coates writes, "we need to recognize
that our bodies have a say in our risk-taking."
Reading list:
The Wisdom of the Body, by Walter Cannon; Creation, by Gore
Vidal; Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger.
Best idea:
None come to mind.
Worst idea:
Too many come to mind.
Holding steady.
More.
Not.
95 JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
For staring down the Internet's enemies.
Law professor | Cambridge, Mass.
When the World Conference on International Telecommunications
convenes in Dubai in December, delegates will tackle an enormously
consequential question: Should the United Nations assert greater control over
the Internet, or should a motley collection of public and private "stakeholders"
continue to govern it? Ahead of the summit, authoritarian countries such as
China and Russia have expressed support for international standards in the
name of cybersecurity -- raising concerns that human rights will be
trampled and the Internet shackled.
We can't say we weren't warned. Jonathan Zittrain's 2008 book, The Future
of the Internet -- and How to Stop It, focused on the threat that
government regulators and companies, in their quest to address security
problems and assert control, pose to digital freedom. It helped establish Zittrain
as the general counsel of the digital age, and the Harvard University law
professor has continued to wrestle with the web's biggest questions ever since.
Is Internet access a human right? How do we respect the rights of the
unwitting people who become the subject of Internet memes? Is it legal for an
insurance company to set rates for its customers based on GPS data? More
than anyone, Zittrain has asked who the Internet's public and private
gatekeepers are, how they're acting, and what that means for the future of the
open web. And he has addressed his own questions by helping establish the
OpenNet Initiative, which monitors Internet surveillance around the world,
and Chilling Effects, which posts legal complaints about online activity. In
May, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission tapped Zittrain to chair a
committee tasked with evaluating the agency's efforts to keep the Internet open
and the telecommunications market competitive. There's little doubt Zittrain is
skeptical of this latest bid by Russia and China to put the Internet back in the
box; the web can't be governed by committee. As he wrote in his book, "The
Net and its issues sail blithely on regardless of the carefully worded
communiqus that emerge from a parade of meetings and consultations."
Reading list:
Consent of the Networked, by Rebecca MacKinnon; Interop:
The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,
by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser; Some Remarks, by Neal
Stephenson.
Best idea:
Dealing with cybersecurity problems through technically facilitated
mutual aid among many participants, rather than solely top-down
mandates or rigid best practices.
Worst idea:
Rioting over a YouTube video.
Tweet! With a link to a more thorough blog entry and a willingness to
tweet later corrections.

96 LUIGI ZINGALES
For reminding us what conservative economics used to look like.
Economist | Chicago
When deficit hawks compare the United States to the ailing economies of
Europe, they're often making a point about America's unsustainable debt and
social welfare spending. But Luigi Zingales, an influential business professor at
the University of Chicago, likens the United States to his native Italy for a
different reason: They're both reeling from crony capitalism. Runaway debt
and ballooning entitlements, he argues, are merely symptoms of a debilitating
disease: widespread collusion between politicians and big business. Zingales
left Italy for the States in 1988 to escape a country that "invented the term
nepotism and perfected the concept of cronyism," only to find the phenomenon
spreading like a virus in his adopted home.
In his new book, A Capitalism for the People, Zingales contends that the
Republican Party abandoned its pro-market principles under George W. Bush
and instead became pro-big business, courting companies with tariffs and tax
breaks rather than building a competitive marketplace. Now he's pleading
with Republican leaders to return to their conservative roots by busting
monopolies, refusing to bail out banks, eliminating de facto corporate subsidies
in the tax code, and imposing a tax on lobbying. "We need to stand up and
criticize business when business is not helping the cause of free markets," he
declares.
It's a resonant message at a fraught moment for American-style capitalism. In
the wake of the global recession, faith in the free market has plunged in
countries such as Italy and Spain and declined in the United States, albeit less
sharply. Nearly 40 percent of Americans believe their country has a system of
crony capitalism, while seven in 10 think government and big business are
working together against them. In that sense, his ringing denunciation is the
Capitalism and Freedom of our time. As economist Tyler Cowen put it, "If I
had to pick out one book to explain what is going on right now to a popular
audience of non-economists, this might well be it."
Reading list:
Bailout, by Neil Barofsky; So Damn Much Money: The
Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American
Government, by Robert Kaiser; Republic, Lost, by Lawrence
Lessig.
Best idea:
Debt restructuring for Greece.
Worst idea:
Another stimulus plan for America.
Hoping a renewal, fearing a decline.
More reformed Europe.
With moderation.
97 VIVIANE REDING
For demanding that Europe's women have a seat at the table.
Vice president, European Commission | Belgium
Among the largest companies in the European Union, women held just 10.3
percent of corporate board seats five years ago. This year, that figure is all of
13.7 percent. "Sorry," Viviane Reding, the European Commission's top justice
official, told Der Spiegel, "that's just too slow for me."
Her solution? Reding this year pushed an ambitious, if improbable, EU law to
create mandatory quotas for women in the boardroom across the member
states of the world's biggest economic union. The proposal called for large
companies to give at least 40 percent of their supervisory board positions to
women by 2018. (In the United States, women filled a grand total of 16
percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies in 2011.)
A native of Luxembourg and ex-journalist, Reding insists that giving women
greater decision-making powers is not only a matter of fairness but also would
be a boon for the economy. Having women on corporate boards corresponds to
higher profits, she argues, and a standardized policy would make intra-
European business easier. Unsurprisingly, she faces entrenched opposition.
The law was shot down amid legal concerns in October, though Reding vowed
to put forward a modified version. She is keeping at it if only because her
proposal is the one serious idea on the table for addressing a gender imbalance
that is consequential enough to impact Europe's economic performance -- and
its values. "I hope that I'll live to see the day when we have a society in which it
isn't important whether you're a man or a woman," she sighs.

98 JONATHAN HAIDT
For revealing the psychology of partisanship.
Psychologist | New York
Why is it that poor Americans might vote against their apparent economic self-
interest and pull the lever for a candidate like Mitt Romney? Jonathan Haidt,
whose work explores the psychology of political and religious division, has a
message for liberals: Conservatives understand how to speak to voters' moral
concerns. Liberals, concludes Haidt, author of this year's The Righteous
Mind, just don't get it.
A leading member of a new generation of psychologists applying the insights of
evolutionary theory to morality, Haidt argues that we form political opinions
not through simple reasoning but based on moral preferences humans have
developed to reinforce ties to larger groups or tribes. He identifies six values
that form the baseline of any moral system: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty,
authority, and sanctity. Using experiments, ethnographies, and surveys of tens
of thousands of people around the world, he demonstrates that both left- and
right-leaning people respond positively to the first three values, though the
left-leaning place greater emphasis on care and fairness. Conservatives,
meanwhile, emphasize loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Both groups value
liberty but consider it threatened by different oppressors. The right wing, Haidt
posits, simply has a greater number of moral taste buds. Arriving in a year
marked by unprecedented political polarization in the United States and
elsewhere, Haidt's book offers a psychological explanation for the partisan
divide. By stepping back and dispassionately examining the deeper origin of our
disunion, he also offers hope that we can achieve something more -- a wisdom
that transcends brute moral emotions.
Reading list:
It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American
Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of
Extremism, by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein; The
Mind and the Market, by Jerry Muller; The Better Angels of
Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.
Best idea:
Paul Romer's charter cities. Start new cities with good norms and
institutions, rather than trying to change old and corrupt ones.
Decline for a while, until we can reboot our institutions and efficiency
and reduce corruption and cronyism.
Less. Europe does not have a strong enough shared identity to manage
a union among unequals. If the weaker nations drop out, a Europe of
wealthy and efficient equals can survive.
Tweet. It's a normal human reaction to want to share interesting and
useful information. I see it as a public good.
99 PETER BEINART
For diagnosing the "crisis of Zionism."
Journalist | New York
Few issues are as contentious as Israel's policies toward the Palestinian
territories, and few debates are as heated as that over the role of America's
Jewish lobby in enabling those policies. Peter Beinart, former editor of the New
Republic, took on both this year with his explicitly controversial new book, The
Crisis of Zionism.
Heralded as "brave" by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (No. 34)
and blurbed by Bill Clinton (No. 3), who called it a "deeply important book
for anyone who cares about Israel," The Crisis of Zionism offers a powerful
critique of both Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the American Jewish
establishment's willingness to go along -- an especially pointed critique in the
midst of a U.S. election year that once again saw politicians in both parties
rushing headlong to profess their reflexive defense of Israeli policies. At its
heart, The Crisis of Zionism is a plea to resurrect what Beinart calls the "liberal
Zionist dream" -- a progressive democratic state that's also capable of
safeguarding the Jewish people -- against the rise of the Israeli far right, which,
aided and abetted by Jewish leaders in the United States, has slowly pushed
Israel toward a de facto one-state solution.
The Crisis of Zionism not only shines a much-needed spotlight on Israel's
hard-right turn, but it may also prove a bellwether for shifting American
attitudes toward the Jewish state. Beinart's call for moral vigilance marks the
rise of a new generation of American Jews who are unwilling to support Israel
blindly. It's unclear if this cadre of young intellectuals can change this bedrock
assumption of American politics, but if Beinart's book is any indication, they're
going to ruffle a few feathers trying.
100 SANA SALEEM
For insisting that free speech is not blasphemy.
Blogger | Pakistan
In September, when deadly riots swept across the globe following the release of
the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims, the seriousness of the charge of
"blasphemy" became starkly clear. In Egypt, for instance, there were calls for
an anti-blasphemy clause in the country's new constitution, and observers
were outraged when officials in Pakistan arrested a 14-year-old Christian girl
under the country's blasphemy laws, widely used to persecute religious
minorities. It will take people like Sana Saleem, a 25-year-old activist and
blogger in Pakistan who is waging her own private campaign against
government censorship, to push back.
In February, Pakistan solicited proposals for a "URL Filtering and Blocking
System" -- a system reminiscent of that in authoritarian China next door that
could allow the government to block unwanted websites en masse. Saleem,
founder of the Karachi-based anti-censorship group Bolo Bhi, which means
"speak up," decided to fight the proposal, the latest in a series of moves by
Islamabad to curb free speech. Saleem reached out to executives at
international companies, asking them not to participate in building Pakistan's
firewall. Despite threats and offensive taunts on Twitter, Saleem and her
partners eventually shamed the government into shelving the proposal. She is
still fighting for an official court injunction.
As she wrote in April on her blog, Mystified Justice, "When a state
embroils its citizens in an 'either you are with us or against us' argument every
dissent is at risk of being equated to treason -- or in an Islamic country,
blasphemy." As an increasingly networked world butts heads with the historical
forces of obscurantism and discrimination, we'll need savvy activists like
Saleem to defend everyone's right to free speech online -- even, or especially, if
we don't like what's being said.
Reading list:
The Moslems Are Coming: Encounters with a Desktop

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