Gladwell og andre 'vigtige tænkere'

Det her er fra en liste over vigtige tænkere og jeg kan ikke huske hvem der har lavet den. Gladwell har skrevet nogle ganske gode bøger, bl.a. Blink. Det vigtigeste for mig at se er, at han insistere på at journalismen skal være inventiv og dermed skriver han mærkeligt nok visionære bøger... det er ganske befriende. Således hører han til vores genre af cunmen, pragmatister og undersøgende journalister... de andre er bare med for sjov.
19. Malcolm Gladwell

for rethinking how we think about thinkers.

journalist | New Yorker | New York

With a mind as unorthodox as his hairdo, Gladwell is a genre-originating journalist: a specialist in translating counterintuitive research for the lay reader on subjects as diverse as Enron, the full-court press in basketball, ketchup, and racial bias. Most recently, he attacked the notion of genius in 2009's Outliers, which argues that circumstance and practice (10,000 hours of practice, to be precise) mean as much as gray matter and natural talent. The brilliance of a Bill Gates or a Mozart is not a freak phenomenon, he writes, but the product of extraordinary amounts of effort at precisely the right moment. By making surprising arguments seem obvious, Gladwell has added a serious dose of empiricism to long-form journalism and changed how we think about thought itself.

Gladwell's favorite thinkers:

* Richard Thaler (No. 7). Thaler is one of the very best of the behavioral economists -- the economists who understand that human beings don't behave according to the arid logic of supply and demand curves. His paper "The Loser's Curse" is perhaps the single smartest thing I've ever read about professional football, and Nudge, the book he co-wrote with Cass Sunstein, is superb.
* Gary Klein. I've been enormously influenced by Klein because he's a psychologist who studies real-world decision-making, as opposed to the way people behave in laboratories. And the worlds he looks at -- firefighters, marines, intensive care nurses -- offer extraordinary insights as to how experts behave in high-pressure situations. His first book, Sources of Power, remains one of my favorites.
* Richard Nisbett. No thinker has had as much influence on my work as Nisbett. Where to begin? He's an environmentalist -- that is, he has systematically and convincingly proven, again and again, that we are creatures of our situations, environments, and cultures. I would recommend anything he's written, but especially The Geography of Thought and Intelligence and How to Get It.
* Iain Pears. Pears is a novelist. He wrote An Instance of the Fingerpost and, most recently, Stone's Fall, among many others. I think he's the finest pure storyteller working in popular fiction, and those of us who are in the business of making arguments and communicating ideas have to pay attention to storytellers because they have the skills we desperately need.



41. Esther Duflo

for adding quantitative rigor to assessments of foreign aid.

economist | MIT | Cambridge, Mass.

If there's any hope of adjudicating the Sachs-Easterly contretemps, the 36-year-old Duflo -- who has stayed neutral -- might be able to provide it. Unlike traditional economists who test new aid products under laboratory conditions, Duflo, who just won a MacArthur "genius" grant and has been hailed as "the new face of French intellectualism," tests products in the field, with all the interference and compounding data points that go with it. She has turned her methods on the questions of whether it's best to give away or sell mosquito nets, whether grandfathers or grandmothers are more likely to spend on the health of their families, and what incentives work for vaccination. As co-founder of MIT's Poverty Action Lab, Duflo is imposing new rigor on everything from women's empowerment to computer-assisted learning: "[W]e are trying to raise expectations but make them real."

Reading list: The Emperor, by Ryszard Kapuscinski; The Biographer's Tale, by A.S. Byatt; In Xanadu, by William Dalrymple.

Wants to visit: Brazil

Gadget: Neither Facebook nor Twitter. BlackBerry.


42. Jared Diamond

for helping us understand how societies not only grow, but die.

Geographer | UCLA | Los Angeles

Diamond writes about destruction. But if his most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was about how Western civilizations destroyed their competition, his most recent book, Collapse, traces how societies, such as Greenland's Vikings, destroy themselves by squandering their natural resources. Climate change may be a new concern, but the need to live sustainably is an old one, Collapse shows. More recently, Diamond has turned his attention to modern predicaments, urging less consumption and population restraint. The Earth today has more than enough resources to sustain its current population, Diamond thinks, but we must use them more intelligently than our ancestors did, lest we go the way of the Vikings.

Reading list: Colomba, by Dacia Maraini; The Divine Comedy, Dante; New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw, Luigi D'Albertis.

Wants to visit: Uzbekistan

Best idea: Triple the price of gasoline in the United States.

Worst idea: Fertilizing the ocean, or injecting gases or particles into the atmosphere to combat climate change.