The Wisdom of the Smart Crowd

We've polled the FP 100 to offer you cutting-edge thinking on everything from what's ahead in 2010 to what they're reading now. Here, the breakdown of who's who on our list.
The List The FP Survey Take the Survey 100 Top Global Thinkers

DECEMBER 2009

Want to know what former President Bill Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, three Nobel Prize-winners, best-selling authors such as Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, and thought leaders from China and Canada to India and Indonesia think about the world's most pressing problems? So did we, which is why Foreign Policy surveyed 2009's Top 100 Global Thinkers, asking them to rate everything from U.S. President Barack Obama's first year in office to which country is the world's most dangerous. Nearly two-thirds participated, offering us unique insight into the collective wisdom of this very special crowd.

Here's what they told us:

  • Barack Obama had a solid first year in office, with the world's big thinkers rating him on average a 7 out of 10 for his performance. But when asked what, exactly, had been his intellectual contribution to foreign policy, our thinkers were hard-pressed to name a specific idea, instead collectively applauding qualities like his "openness" and "multipolar worldview" (and even, explicitly, the fact that he isn't George W. Bush).

  • A majority (59 percent) think the worst of the global recession is over, that the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan is the world's most dangerous (79 percent), that China is the inevitable next global power (71 percent), and prefer the BlackBerry (54 percent) over the much ballyhooed iPhone.

  • The most influential world leaders outside the United States are Chinese President Hu Jintao (by a large margin), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But our thinkers reached absolutely no consensus at all about the thinkers who should be shaping the world. Asked what one person we should listen to in order to make the world a better place, our thinkers produced no fewer than 34 nominees, including everyone from the Dalai Lama to James Hansen, Samuel Huntington, Angela Merkel, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  • Although daily headlines this year often focused on the bloody mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq, our global thinkers identified news from Africa -- the good (successful grassroots development), the bad (widespread crop failures), and the tragic (unrest in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) -- as among the most underreported stories of 2009. Perhaps counterintuitively, our thinkers also ranked economic news as partially overlooked even in this year of global economic crisis.

  • Finally, looking ahead to 2010, the survey found many big thinkers convinced that a major crisis with Iran (29 percent) will be next year's major "global game-changer." Other predictions for 2010 include: a possible collapse of the Pakistani state, a dollar crisis or Asian asset bubble-burst, civil unrest in China, biological terrorism, and a global pandemic.

BY VICTORIA WILL for FP

 SUBJECTS:
 

BEINGTHERE

8:44 AM ET

December 1, 2009

Obama, Gates fortunate to have Petraeus

This top general has the ears and eyes of the world. He also has the intellectual ability and on-the-ground knowledge to improve the AFPAK situation - if he can keep the attention of the president and defense sec. Persistent rumors of a Petraeus presidential run probably do not benefit his military career or the USA's opportunities to better the situation.

 

SQUEEDLE

3:23 PM ET

December 21, 2009

Get a new FP 100

Frankly, I'm not impressed by the answers of your FP 100. They show some real ignorance of world affairs, obvious ideological bias, and a clear focus on immediate issues at the expense of important ones. Of your "selected answers," I found not one thoughtful, wise, insightful response.

Also the question about the "most dangerous country in the world" can be interpreted one of two ways, and that shows in the answers. Did you mean, most dangerous to others, or most dangerous to live in?