1. The United States spends $7,290 per person annually on health care, the most of any country. How much does the No. 2 country spend?
a) $4,763
b) $5,852
c) $6,612

2. How many aid workers were killed last year worldwide?
a) 22             
b) 72              
c) 122

3. How many people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger?
a) 250 million           
b) 500 million           
c) 1 billion

4. By what percent has the proportion of women in the world's legislatures increased since 1995?
a) 22 percent            
b) 42 percent            
c) 62 percent    

5. In which country are taxes on gasoline the highest?
a) Norway                
b) Turkey                  
c) United States

6. Which of the following places has the most oil per capita?
a) Kuwait                   
b) Greenland                        
c) Russia

7. Which country has the highest top rate of income tax?
a) Sweden     
b) Denmark  
c) Japan

8. Which country spends the most on its military, as a percentage of its GDP?
a) Israel                     
b) Oman                    
c) United States

Answers to the FP Quiz

1) A, $4,763. Norway spent $4,763 per person on health care in 2007 when adjusted for purchasing power, second to the United States, which spent $7,290 per person -- a whopping 53 percent more -- according to OECD data. Given all that extra spending, which gobbles up $1 out of every $6 of U.S. economic output, Americans aren't commensurately healthier, and one out of six adults isn't even insured.

2) C, 122. More than 100 humanitarian aid workers lost their lives violently in 2008, compared with 36 in 1998. Including those who were kidnapped or seriously injured in attacks, 260 were victims of "security incidents" in 2008, the highest number on record according to data from the Aid Worker Security Database. The expanding number of aid workers isn't the cause: Victims of security incidents increased from four per 10,000 humanitarians in 1998 to nine per 10,000 in 2008. From 2006 to 2008, three-fourths of attacks occurred in six countries, listed in descending order: Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Chad, and Iraq.

3) C, 1 billion. For the first time in history, the number of people who go hungry each day has reached 1 billion, or one out of every six, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Lower incomes and increased unemployment due to the Great Recession have forced 100 million more people into chronic hunger this year.

4) C, 62 percent. In December 1995, the average national-level legislative chamber (lower house, upper house, or single house) was 11.3 percent women. By December 2008, the average had increased 62 percent to 18.3 percent women, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of parliaments. Women have come a long way since 1945, when women made up 3 percent of lower houses and 2.2 percent of upper houses of the world's then 26 legislatures.

5) B, Turkey. As of Jan. 1, 2009, petrol in Turkey was taxed at roughly $3.90 per gallon, according to the OECD, up from about 26 cents per gallon as of Jan. 1, 1998. Among OECD countries, Americans pay the lowest federal gas taxes, 18.4 cents per gallon. With state taxes, the average comes to 47 cents per gallon as of July. Norway is a petrostate, but that doesn't mean it doesn't tax its people's gasoline. The government there rakes in $3.44 per gallon.

6) B, Greenland. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the amount of oil and natural gas in northeast Greenland is equivalent to 31.4 billion barrels. Even if only 7 percent of it were oil, Greenland would tie Kuwait for most oil per capita at 38,645 barrels per person. Greenland recently received increased powers of self-governance from Denmark, and if recovery of the oil -- trapped in icy, difficult terrain -- ever became feasible, some say it could become the world's next Dubai.

7) B, Denmark. In 2009, the top rate of personal income tax in Denmark was 62.3 percent. Sweden has the second highest, at 56.7 percent. Japan comes in at 50 percent, still significantly higher than the U.S. top rate of 35 percent. Denmark's recent tax-reform bill, passed earlier this year, reduces income taxes for the poor and the middle class, but doesn't affect top earners.

8) B, Oman. Oman spent 10.7 percent of its GDP on military expenditures in 2007, followed by Saudi Arabia, which spent 9.3 percent, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Only 12 countries spent 4 percent or more of their GDP on the military that year, with most in the Middle East. Israel, in a neighborhood with few allies, spent an estimated 8.6 percent of its GDP on its military. The figure for the United States was 4 percent, though that amount constituted 45 percent of the world's total military spending.

Economic crisis, mounting national debt, excessive foreign commitments -- this is no way to run an empire. America needs serious strategic counseling. And fast. It has never been Rome, and to adopt its strategies no -- its ruthless expansion of empire, domination of foreign peoples, and bone-crushing brand of total war -- would only hasten America's decline. Better instead to look to the empire's eastern incarnation: Byzantium, which outlasted its Roman predecessor by eight centuries. It is the lessons of Byzantine grand strategy that America must rediscover today.

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Fortunately, the Byzantines are far easier to learn from than the Romans, who left virtually no written legacy of their strategy and tactics, just textual fragments and one bookish compilation by Vegetius, who knew little about statecraft or war. The Byzantines, however, wrote it all down -- their techniques of persuasion, intelligence gathering, strategic thinking, tactical doctrines, and operational methods. All of this is laid out clearly in a series of surviving Byzantine military manuals and a major guidebook on statecraft.

I've spent the past two decades poring over these texts to compile a study of Byzantine grand strategy. The United States would do well to heed the following seven lessons if it wishes to remain a great power:

I. Avoid war by every possible means, in all possible circumstances, but always act as if war might start at any time. Train intensively and be ready for battle at all times -- but do not be eager to fight. The highest purpose of combat readiness is to reduce the probability of having to fight.

II. Gather intelligence on the enemy and his mentality, and monitor his actions continuously. Efforts to do so by all possible means might not be very productive, but they are seldom wasted.

III. Campaign vigorously, both offensively and defensively, but avoid battles, especially large-scale battles, except in very favorable circumstances. Don't think like the Romans, who viewed persuasion as just an adjunct to force. Instead, employ force in the smallest possible doses to help persuade the persuadable and harm those not yet amenable to persuasion.

IV. Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with maneuver warfare -- lightning strikes and offensive raids to disrupt enemies, followed by rapid withdrawals. The object is not to destroy your enemies, because they can become tomorrow's allies. A multiplicity of enemies can be less of a threat than just one, so long as they can be persuaded to attack one another.

V. Strive to end wars successfully by recruiting allies to change the balance of power. Diplomacy is even more important during war than peace. Reject, as the Byzantines did, the foolish aphorism that when the guns speak, diplomats fall silent. The most useful allies are those nearest to the enemy, for they know how best to fight his forces.

VI. Subversion is the cheapest path to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies. Remember: Even religious fanatics can be bribed, as the Byzantines were some of the first to discover, because zealots can be quite creative in inventing religious justifications for betraying their own cause ("since the ultimate victory of Islam is inevitable anyway …").

VII. When diplomacy and subversion are not enough and fighting is unavoidable, use methods and tactics that exploit enemy weaknesses, avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down the enemy's strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal -- if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.

The multipolar world has become a global reality, recognized as a near certainty by no less an authority than the U.S. intelligence community. But it wasn't always such. For most of its geopolitical life, "multipolar" has been a synonym for America-bashing, whether by erstwhile allies in the Cold War or an anxious Russia grappling with its post-superpower status. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once bragged of the United States as the world's "indispensable nation"; today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promises to tilt the balance "away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world."

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circa 1350 to circa 1900: Although the term is not yet in use, Europe remains for centuries basically a multipolar world: Several countries vie for dominance, but none reigns supreme for more than a few decades at a time.

March 5, 1946: Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech heralds the start of the Cold War, rendering the geopolitical world bipolar overnight. Refusing to take sides, five countries found the Non-Aligned Movement in 1955 under the leadership of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

1969: "Our deepest challenge," U.S. national security advisor Henry Kissinger writes, will be "to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two superpowers." A year later, President Richard Nixon articulates the Nixon Doctrine, which seeks to exploit diplomatic divisions to reduce America's military commitments.

January 8, 1978: French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing describes his differences with U.S. President Jimmy Carter as a "means to attain our grand objective, namely, the organization of a multipolar world which will not be limited by the decisions made by two superpowers alone."

1987: In The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Yale University historian Paul Kennedy predicts the balance of military power will shift over the coming 20 to 30 years, creating a truly multipolar world around 2009. "If the patterns of history are any guide, the multipolar economic balance will begin to shift the military balances," he later tells the New York Times.

December 25, 1991: The Soviet Union ceases to exist, eliminating the second Cold War "pole" and launching a debate about the new world order. "Global politics," Samuel Huntington argues later in Foreign Affairs, "is now passing through one or two uni-multipolar decades before it enters a truly multipolar 21st century."

April 23, 1997: Fear of U.S. unipolarity inspires China and Russia to sign a "Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order" in Moscow.

February 2, 2000: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who earlier dubbed the United States the "indispensable nation," claims the U.S. is not looking to "establish and enforce" a unipolar world. Economic integration, she says, has already created "the kind of world that might even be called 'multipolar.'"

Spring 2003: Calling for a "multipolar world" becomes a euphemism for opposing the Iraq war. British Prime Minister Tony Blair warns that French President Jacques Chirac's multipolar vision, and his prolific use of the term, is "dangerous and destabilizing."

January 26, 2007: A New York Times editorial describes the "emergence of a multipolar world," with China taking "a parallel place at the table along with other centers of power, like Brussels or Tokyo."

November 20, 2008: In its "Global Trends 2025" report, the U.S. National Intelligence Council declares the advent of a "global multipolar system" as one of the world's "relative certainties" within two decades.

2009: U.S. President Barack Obama takes office with what many deem a multipolar worldview, prioritizing rising powers such as Brazil, China, India, and Russia. "We will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says in a July address.

July 22, 2009: "We are trying to build a multipolar world," U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden declares in a speech in Ukraine.

The fear of being personally affected by climate change apparently has little to do with reason. When a recent Gallup poll asked, "How serious of a threat is global warming to you and your family?" some of the most nervous respondents were in the countries least susceptible to climate change, such as Italy and Japan. Conversely, respondents from countries like South Africa and China, where the public is less frightened of climate change, are, according to new data from risk assessment firm Maplecroft, far more vulnerable.

Below are percentages of poll respondents by country who view global warming as a "serious threat":

Italy: 90%

Japan: 75%

South Africa: 67%

United States: 64%

China: 33%

(Source: Gallup World Poll surveys conducted  between 2007 and 2009)

When India's first Wal-Mart opened this summer in Amritsar, the response was mixed, with detractors fearing that big-box stores would eventually crowd out India's fabled "wallah" culture. What no one remarked on, however, was that Wal-Mart's debut in a country is a bellwether for future growth. Indeed, Wal-Mart has started operations in 15 countries since 1991, and 13 of them have had boom economies, with an average of 4.4 percent annual growth since Wal-Mart arrived. Over the last five years, the economies of Wal-Mart countries outside the United States have grown 40 percent faster than the world average. So what's going on? Does the ability to buy giant bags of Froot Loops at cut-rate prices inspire economic growth? More likely, Wal-Mart is simply a smart, cautious investor. "Wal-Mart chooses to go places with a sizable middle class," says Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian who just published a book on Wal-Mart's rise. And Wal-Mart's attention to middle-class growth could pay off for the company in the future.

The portion of the global middle class that lives in the developing world should rise from 56 percent in 2000 to 93 percent in 2030, according to the World Bank. Next up for the Wal-Mart effect, Lichtenstein says: Russia and Eastern Europe. Picture the new global bourgeoisie outfitted with cheap hibachi grills, extra-durable puppy toys, and energy-efficient minifridges, and you've got a glimpse of the coming Wal-Mart revolution.

Does the modern world owe its very existence to the humble spud? A recent study by a pair of economists suggests that the introduction of the American potato to Europe and later Asia and Africa might have been one of the most significant events in the history of human development. [[SHARE]]

The importance of potatoes first hit home for co-author Nancy Qian during a trip to rural Rwanda, where she noticed something about her hosts' diet. "All they were eating were potatoes," she says. At the time, Qian, a Yale University professor, was looking into how Rwanda's population explosion had helped cause its ethnic conflict, and she remembered reading a paper on how Ireland's 18th-century population boom had been fueled by the introduction of the potato. (Of course, the infamous 19th-century potato famine later brought thousands of Irish immigrants to the United States.)

Qian, along with Harvard University's Nathan Nunn, decided to see how universal the connection was. Looking at population trends from 1700, when the potato was introduced to the Old World, to 1900, they estimated that 12 percent of the population growth and 47 percent of the urbanization during this period was directly potato-related. Moreover, regions that are more suitable for potato cultivation -- Europe and India -- tended to urbanize and develop much faster than places that aren't, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

What gives the spud its magical power? First, as Qian says, "If you needed to choose only one crop to survive on, the potato would be it." It contains every nutrient humans need except for vitamins A and D, meaning that a person could survive indefinitely on only potatoes, milk, and a bit of sunlight. Potatoes are also very hardy, and they provide much higher yields than crops like corn and wheat, allowing countries to devote less space to farmland and more to cities and factories.

This could be why leaders from Frederick the Great to Ban Ki-moon have recognized the potato's power and encouraged farmers to grow them. Although its effect on population growth is less pronounced today, the potato is still a potent weapon in the fight against malnutrition, which led the United Nations to declare 2008 the International Year of the Potato. And that's no small fry.

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Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi

Claim to infamy: Influential ally of the supreme leader. Thinks men should be permitted to beat their wives for not fulfilling their sexual obligations.

Mojtaba Khamenei

Claim to infamy: Son of the supreme leader and rumored possible successor. Despite having no official title, he reportedly took direct control of armed militias during the post-election protests, when scores of demonstrators were killed.

Hassan Taeb

Claim to infamy: Commander of the paramilitary Basij force. Oversees the protection of the Islamic Republic from "cultural threats" such as improperly dressed women. Recently accused of sanctioning and then covering up the rape and torture of demonstrators in Iran's prisons.

Saeed Mortazavi

Claim to infamy: As Tehran's chief prosecutor, Mortazavi was in charge of interrogating political prisoners. Under his watch, photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured, brutally raped, and killed. Mortazavi was recently "promoted" to deputy prosecutor general.

Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani

Claim to infamy: Commander of the supreme leader's military unit, the Quds Force. Has been linked to terrorist attacks around the world, from the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina to roadside bombings in Iraq.

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At the time of the revolution, I was a 19-year-old kid. I lived in one of the most poverty-stricken parts of Tehran and was active in the anti-shah resistance. I was captured by the illusion that we could create a new history and change the course of humanity. I now know that position is completely unsound. We Iranians had to pay a huge price to learn this truth.

[During the 1997 presidential election], I took advantage of a precious opportunity to expose the assassination of political dissidents and minorities. It was dangerous, but I was able to force the regime to confess and accept responsibility. I demonstrated that dozens of people were assassinated and that the orders had come from the supreme leader and a few other senior leaders. Exposing these killings has meant that such crimes have not -- until now -- been repeated.

Paying a price can be a two-way street. When the Iranian regime put me in jail, I thought they should also pay a price. I wrote many letters and articles from my prison cell, and I managed to smuggle them out and have them widely circulated.

I spent time in the solitary-confinement cells of the Department of Prisons, the Intelligence Ministry, and the Revolutionary Guards. The worst of all was, and still is, the Revolutionary Guards. They use any tool -- even toilets, showers, water, and tea -- to put stress and pressure on a prisoner in order to bring him or her to the breaking point.

[Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei, to stay in power, has no choice but to convert the monarchical order into a fascist regime. So the Iranian [dissident movement] must organize, launch social mobilization, and establish its leadership to obtain democracy through nonviolent resistance.

Pro-democracy Iranians are deeply opposed to American interference in the internal affairs of Iran. Iran's transition toward democracy is the task of the Iranians, not foreign governments. But people of all countries and civil organizations must give active moral support to the people of Iran. Human rights are a global matter.