The World's Top Global Thinkers

And finally the results are out. The world's leading thinker, according to a poll conducted by Prospect magazine, is the economist Armatya Sen, followed by Raghuram Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and the novelist Arundhati Roy.

Sen received degrees from the the University of Calcutta and Cambridge and has taught at Jadavpur University, LSE, Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. Rajan has degrees from IIT Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and MIT. Roy studied architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning in Delhi.

The careers of Sen and Ragan illustrate a typical feature of Indian higher education, some excellent undergraduate teaching but somehow the outstanding students end up leaving India.

Prospect notes that the poll received "intense media interest in India" so it would be premature to conclude that the country has become the new global Athens.

The top non-Asian thinker is Pope Francis.

Personally, I am disappointed that the historian Perry Anderson only got 28th place.  I am also surprised that feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler, whose brilliant satire -- Hamas as part of the global left and so on -- is under-appreciated, was only 21st.