Commodities Watch: FT.com / Comment - Where have all the thinkers gone?

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my office, reading Foreign Policy magazine, when I made a striking discovery. Sitting next door to me, separated only by a narrow partition, is one of the world’s leading thinkers. Every year, Foreign Policy lists the people it regards as the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. And there, at number 37, was Martin Wolf.

The list of intellectuals from 2010, he suggested, looked pretty feeble compared with a similar list that could have been drawn up in the mid 19th century.

Even if, like Foreign Policy, you have a preference for politicians, the contrast between the giants of yesteryear and the relative pygmies of today is alarming. In 1861 the list would have included Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck and Garibaldi. Their modern equivalents would be Mr Obama, Nick Clegg, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi.

A list of significant intellectuals alive in 1939 would have included Einstein, Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Picasso, Freud, Gandhi, Orwell, Churchill, Hayek, Sartre.

A second possibility is that familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe we are surrounded by thinkers who are just as great as the giants of the past, but we cannot recognise the fact because they are still in our midst.

In the modern world more people have access to knowledge and the ability to publish. The internet also makes collaboration much easier and modern universities promote specialisation. So it could be that the way that knowledge advances these days is through networks of specialists working together, across the globe – rather than through a single, towering intellect pulling together a great theory in the reading room of the British Museum. It is a less romantic idea – but, perhaps, it is more efficient.

And then there is a final possibility. That, for all its wealth and its gadgets, our generation is not quite as smart as it thinks it is.

Commodities Watch