Haiti only tends to make international headlines following a massive global cataclysm. That's why the work of Paul Farmer, who has for years argued that the country's misery is the result of human corruption and mismanagement, not the wrath of nature, is essential to reminding the world that the Western Hemisphere's most failed state hasn't gone away. But Farmer isn't just an advocate for providing aid -- he's a trenchant critic of how it is doled out. In his new book, Haiti After the Earthquake, Farmer points a finger at the U.S. government, whose policies over the last century, he says, have contributed enormously to Haiti's instability.
Take his critique of Haiti's massive cholera outbreak over the past year, its largest ever. Farmer, who is also the co-founder of the international medical NGO Partners in Health and was deputy to U.N. Haiti envoy Bill Clinton (No. 20), has ripped the international community for not anticipating the possibility of such a catastrophe in a country with such poverty and poor sanitation, not to mention downplaying the crisis once it hit. "If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti -- and we knew it," Farmer says.
Muse FDR.
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? Not an either-or question.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Spring. I think that good things will come out of this.
Reading list To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild; Deep China, by Arthur Kleinman, et al.; A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin.
Best idea The Tobin tax on financial transactions.
Worst idea America vs. China.
This year, Anne-Marie Slaughter showed there's life after politics. After stepping down in February as head of the State Department's policy planning shop -- where she oversaw a major review of America's diplomatic and development efforts -- Slaughter returned to her perch at Princeton University, but if anything her public profile has only expanded as she has transformed herself into a public intellectual for a new-media world. Between her new blog on the Atlantic's website and lively Twitter feed -- recent output includes debates with fellow Global Thinkers Clay Shirky (No. 82) and Ethan Zuckerman (No. 73) -- she regularly argues for the creation of a newly networked, globalized foreign policy, one that takes into account the immense changes reshaping the world of diplomacy. "[T]he traditional tools of fighting, talking, pressuring, and persuading government-to-government really aren't working so well," she wrote in July. "Thirty years of urging reform produced next to nothing; 6 months of digitally and physically organized social protests and a political earthquake is shaking the broader Middle East."
Muse Franklin D. Roosevelt, for continually learning and adapting to change.
Stimulus or austerity? Stimulus.
America or China? America.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Arab Spring.
Reading list Thinking About Leadership, by Nannerl O. Keohane; WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, by Micah L. Sifry; Everything Is Obvious*: *Once You Know the Answer, by Duncan Watts.
Best idea Passing a constitutional amendment to ban private money in federal elections.
Worst idea Ending the euro.
For years, Kishore Mahbubani has been arguing that Asian powers are ascending while the influence of Western democracies is declining -- and that Western countries have as much to learn from Asia as vice versa. Back in 2001, he wrote, "If my intuition is proven right, we will begin to see, for the first time in five hundred years, a two-way flow in the passage of ideas between the East and the West early this century." With the United States mired in economic crisis and political dysfunction while China and India continue to grow at a healthy clip, this Singaporean diplomat turned academic is now taking a well-deserved victory lap on op-ed pages from Tokyo to New York.
Mahbubani argues that Western governments, instead of rigidly adhering to free market orthodoxy, should "relearn the virtue of pragmatism" from India and China, which found prosperity by abandoning Nehruvian socialism and Maoism. "I used to be regularly lectured by Westerners on the inability of Asians to slay their sacred cows. Today, the Western intelligentsia seems equally afraid to attack their own sacred cows," he wrote this year. More controversially, he thinks that U.S. congressional dysfunction and the growing influence of the Tea Party are evidence that American democracy is no longer adequate to meet the challenges of the global economy. "Only one phrase," he writes, "captures the current Asian perception of the West: sheer incredulity."
Muse Niccolo Machiavelli.
Stimulus or austerity? Austerity.
America or China? Both.
Arab Spring or Arab Winter? Arab Spring.
Reading list A Different Sky, by Meira Chand; Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt; Zero-Sum World, by Gideon Rachman.
Best idea $1 a gallon gasoline tax for Americans.
Worst idea The American Tea Party's proposal to keep reducing American taxes.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has spent her career shuttling between the rarified world of international economic institutions and the rough-and-tumble politics of her native Nigeria. Most recently, she served for four years as managing director of the World Bank, where she pushed initiatives like "diaspora bonds" that would allow immigrants in the West to invest in their home countries.
In July, the Harvard- and MIT-educated Okonjo-Iweala returned to Nigeria as President Goodluck Jonathan's finance minister, a job she had held once before. Last time under Okonjo-Wahala, or "Trouble Woman," as she's nicknamed, the country cut inflation in half and averaged 6 percent growth per year. This time her focus is on reducing Nigeria's debt burden and creating jobs, despite the slump in the global economy and considerable challenges at home, including entrenched corruption and a string of terrorist attacks. "Africa is the next BRIC," she told the Washington Post. "There is value in Africa for those who have the appetite to look in new directions."
SUBJECTS:
(228)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE