Chrystia wrote an essay for Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers Issue on the economists and financiers whose ideas survived the financial crisis:

In a letter to shareholders written just after the dot-com bust, Warren Buffett observed, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” The 2008 financial crisis had a similar effect on our economic and financial gurus: It revealed whose thinking was based on whiggish, End-of-History assumptions about the essential triumph of Western democratic capitalism and whose mental framework admitted the possibility of radical disruption. The thinkers whose intellectual — and maybe even psychological — starting point was that Western market democracy is neither perfect nor eternal turned out to be much better at foreshadowing the financial crisis, and it is those thinkers whose ideas are the most relevant today, in the uncertain, post-crisis world.

These specialists in uncertainty are a broad church: They range from academic economists who saw the crisis coming, like New York University’s Nouriel Roubini and the University of Chicago’s Raghuram Rajan, to philosophers of finance like George Soros and Mohamed El-Erian, who have made huge market bets, as well as intellectual ones, on how bubbles are formed and how they burst. One striking similarity between many of them is that they have seen regime change up close.

The most dramatic example is Soros, whose formative life experience was the Nazi invasion of Budapest when he was 13 years old. That trauma taught him two things: that the world could change overnight, and that those, like his beloved father Tivadar, who responded to that upheaval instantly were the ones who survived. Roubini, who is sometimes caricatured as either Dr. Doom or the Hugh Hefner of the dismal-science set, is likewise best described as a specialist in revolution. He spent his childhood being moved around volatile parts of the world from Istanbul to Tehran to Tel Aviv — and began his career as an economist studying the 1990s emerging-markets crises in Latin America, Asia, and Russia. El-Erian, Rajan, and Daron Acemoglu, a widely cited young Turkish economist, also have both personal and professional experience of rapidly, and sometimes traumatically, changing social and economic orders.

These men were all born or at least partly raised outside the United States. That is surely no accident. In the 20th century, and even in the 19th and 18th, America was the world’s laboratory, the place where many of the best, and most revolutionary, ways of organizing government and the economy were being worked out. The United States is still the world’s most powerful country and most intellectually vibrant — after all, these global thinkers now make their home in America — but partly because the United States is so big and has been so prosperous for so long, American-centric thinkers have been relatively slow to spot the challenges to the Washington Consensus and offer coherent alternatives.

Being a “global nomad,” as Roubini calls himself, has another intellectual advantage. Thanks to communism’s collapse, the lowering of trade barriers, and the technology revolution, the world economy is more interdependent than ever. This group takes America’s connection to the global economy as the starting point for its analysis — hence El-Erian’s emphasis on global financial imbalances (also a signature theme of Martin Wolf‘s Financial Times columns) and the relationship Rajan traces between rising income inequality and its U.S. political manifestation in subprime mortgages.

This crew is all about big ideas and the big picture — their frame of reference is global, and their intellectual strength is their ability to understand that entire economic systems can, and do, collapse. Paradoxically, the opposite impulse is simultaneously in fashion: You might call it the economics of small steps, an approach that eschews the big theory altogether in favor of smaller, achievable, and, crucially, measurable proposals.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.