“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” Freedom of speech and expression is something which we all boast about, but only few personalities have shown real courage in taking their ideas and thoughts to the public. Foreign Policy magazine recently came up with a list of the top 100 “Global Thinkers” and six Indian Americans were successful in making it to the list.
Narayana Kocherlakota
Narayana Kocherlakota, an economist who serves as the president of Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis came 10thin the list.
Kocherlakota made a public announcement in the month of September, asking the Federal Reserve Bank to reduce the interest rates to zero until unemployment falls below 5.5 percent, reports Foreign Policy.
Kocherlakota was appointed to the post of president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank in the year 2008. Prior to this, he was a member of the Minneapolis Fed’s Research staff and also worked as a Research consultant for the Bank.
Born in a Telugu Brahmin family, Kocherlakota holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton in 1983.
Ruchir Sharma
Ruchir Sharma is a Managing Director and the head of the Emerging MarketsEquity team at Morgan StanleyInvestment Management.
Sharma holds great passion towards writing and is the author of the economic bestseller ‘Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles’ (Breakout Nations). His outstanding contribution to the intellectual debate in 2012 and his book made him eligible for this recognition. Breakout Nations ”debunks the conventional wisdom that the emerging markets of the last decade will continue to drive global growth in the next one’’, reports Foreign Policy.
Sharma worked as a contributing editor with Newsweek earlier and his op-eds used to appear in prestigious publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times and Foreign Affairs. Apart from this, he also writes columns on global financial markets for The Economic Times.
Sharma completed his graduation from Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi.
Raj Chetty
Raj Chetty is a professor of economics atHarvard University and he also serves the post of the director of the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at the university. He was a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Chetty has been successful in overturning several age-old assumptions related to economics and ensured a place for him at the U.S. policy debate, by discussing everything from unemployment benefits to tax breaks.
Chetty, a 2012 MacArthur Fellow has published numerous papers in prestigious journals, such as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Political Economy. He was listed as one of the top 8 young economists in the world by The Economist in the year 2008 and he is one among the most cited young economists in the world.
Chetty holds a graduation in arts from Harvard University and he also received a Ph.D from the same university in the year 2003.
Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Rajan is an economist who serves as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He also works as Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and as a visiting professor for the World Bank, Federal Reserve Board, and Swedish Parliamentary Commission.
In the year 2005 Rajan delivered a controversial paper “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?’, in which he criticized the financial sector and “argued that disaster might loom.” Even though Rajan received negative response from everyone at that time, his views were seen as prophetic after the 2008 economic crisis.
Rajan, who took charge as the Chief Economic advisor few months before is in the running for the next RBI Governor of India.
Rajan holds a degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration from IIM Ahmedabad and a PhD in management from MIT.
Vivek Wadhwa
Vivek Wadhwa is a technology entrepreneur and academic.
Wadhwa plays a prominent role in instituting start-up visa, which will help entrepreneurs with proven job creation and company size obtain long-term visas. According to Wadhwa if this movement is not executed skilled immigrants will be gone. He also adds, ‘’they’ll be back home building the next Googles and Intels in other countries, and we will wake up five years from now and wonder how we let this happen.”
Wadhwa was honoured with the title “leader of tomorrow” by Forbes magazine in the year 1999 and he received the “2012 Outstanding American by Choice” award by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Wadhwa holds a B.A. in Computing Studies from the University of Canberra, in Australia, and an MBA from New York University. He is founding president of the Carolinas chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TIE), a non-profit global network intended to foster entrepreneurship.
Ricken Patel
Ricken Patel is co-founder and executive director of Avaaz.org, a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict. The mission of the organization is to “close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want”.
With this new movement, Patel has established a model for advancing human rights and democracy. He worked as an analyst in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone and his organization took inspiration from the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org.
Patel was voted “Ultimate Gamechanger in Politics” in the year 2009 by the Huffington Post and was named a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum.
He studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) at Balliol College, Oxford University and holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University.
source::::::silicon india net
Natarajan
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