Top Global Thinkers

Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers List: Which think tankers made the cut?

By Allen McDuffee

Foreign Policy magazine published its list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for 2011. Last year, think tankers didn’t do so well on the list. And while the top of the list is devoted to those who sparked, shaped or otherwise engaged the Arab Spring, a few more think tankers managed to make the cut this year.

Here are the seven who made it:

•Condoleezza Rice, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, shares the dubious honor with Dick Cheney at #12 “For making the world we live in.”

Carmen Reinhart (with co-author Ken Rogoff) of the Peterson Institute for International Economics is at #25 “For raising the alarm about America’s debt burden.”

•Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, comes in at #65 “For showing that a handout can be the best kind of leg up.”

•Center for a New American Security’s Robert Kaplan makes the list at #67 “For redrawing the global map of our future.”

•George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen, also a Cato fellow, is #72 “For finding markets in everything.”

•Jared Cohen, director of Google's think/do tank, Google Ideas, shares #83 with the State Department’s Alec Ross “For trying to drag diplomacy into the 21st century.

•And at #97 is Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development “For sounding the alarm on China’s economic ascendancy.”

By Allen McDuffee  |  09:18 AM ET, 11/28/2011