Bill Drayton: Social Entrepreneur, CEO and Founder of Ashoka.

Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur.  In elementary school, Bill loved geography and history and was equally unmotivated in Latin and math. His real passion in those years went to sailing, and starting and running a series of newspapers in his school and beyond. In high school he created and built the Asia Society into the largest student organization. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table, an interdisciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. While at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.

He graduated from Harvard with highest honors and went on to study at Balliol College in Oxford University, where he attained his M.A. with First Class Honors.

Bill is also a manager and management consultant – choices that also grow from his fascination with how human institutions work. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is trained in economics, law, and management, the three key interventionist disciplines. After he graduated from Yale Law School in 1970, Bill began his career as a consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York, gaining wide experience serving both public and private clients.

From 1977 to 1981, Bill served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he had lead responsibility in representing the environment in Administration-wide policy development, notably including budget, energy, and economic policy. He successfully “intrapreneured” a series of major innovations and reforms in the field, ranging from the introduction of emissions trading (the basis of Kyoto) to the use of economics-defined incentives to remove the advantage of delaying compliance.

After his term at the EPA ended in 1981, he returned to McKinsey half-time and launched both Ashoka and Save EPA (an association of professional environmental managers that helped the Congress, press, administration, citizen groups, and public understand and the block much of the radically destructive policies proposed by the Administrator Ann Gorsuch and others). Bill also founded and led Environmental Safety (which helps develop and spread better ways of implementing environmental laws).

With the support that he received unexpectedly when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, he was able to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is currently the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. He is also chair of Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!

Bill has received many awards for his achievements. He has received Yale School of Management’s annual Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and Common Cause awarded him its Public Service Achievement Award. In 2005, he was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he was awarded Yale Law School’s highest alumni honor, The Yale Law School Award of Merit – for having made a substantial contribution to Public Service. In 2006, he was recognized as being one of Harvard University’s 100 “Most Influential Alumni.” In 2007, he was awarded Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship’s (CASE) Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s 2007 Honorary Fellow Award, the Goi Peace Foundation’s Peace Award, and Yale Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2009.

 See, Bill Drayton, Ashoka, Leadership Team.

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James Gustave Speth: Professor of Law

James Gustave “Gus” Speth joined the faculty at Vermont Law School in 2010. A Distinguished Senior Fellow with Demos, he completed his decade-long tenure in 2009 as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1993 to 1999, he was administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the U.N. Development Group. Prior to his service at the U.N., he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration; and senior attorney and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Throughout his career, Professor Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President’s Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation’s Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America’s Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Environmental Law Institute and the League of Conservation Voters, and the Blue Planet Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Clark University, College of the Atlantic, Vermont Law School, Middlebury College, and the University of South Carolina. He is the author, co-author or editor of six books, including the award-winning “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability” and “Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment.”

Professor Speth serves on the boards of the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New Economics Institute, New Economy Network, 1Sky, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities. He graduated from Yale University in 1964 with a BA degree in political science, and earned an LLM degree in economics from Oxford University in 1966 and his JD degree from the Yale Law School in 1969.

See James Gustave Speth, Vermont Law School, Bio.

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Photo by John Chase, Harvard

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

His books include Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (1993), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (1998), The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (1998), The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (2001), Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003), Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006) and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World(2008).

Ferguson has written and presented five major television series, including The Ascent of Money, which won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary. His most recent books are High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (2010) and Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a major TV documentary series. Civilization will be published in the U.S. on November 1 and will air on PBS in 2012.

A weekly columnist for Newsweek and a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV, Niall Ferguson divides his time between the United States and the United Kingdom. He is currently working on a life of Henry Kissinger. The film based on his interviews with Kissinger won the 2011 New York Film Festival prize for Best Documentary.

The London Sunday Times called Civilization “a masterpiece … a pulsing energy suffuses his account and fascinating facts burst like fireworks on every page”. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

 See Niall Ferguson, About.

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Dr. Richard Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position he has held since July 2003.

The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.  …

From January 2001 to June 2003, Dr. Richard Haass was director of policy planning for the Department of State, where he was a principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate to hold the rank of ambassador, Dr. Haass also served as U.S. coordinator for policy toward the future of Afghanistan and U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process. For his efforts, he received the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award.

Dr. Haass has extensive additional government experience. From 1989 to 1993, he was special assistant to President George H.W. Bush and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. In 1991, Dr. Haass was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for his contributions to the development and articulation of U.S. policy during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Previously, he served in the Departments of State (1981‑85) and Defense (1979‑80) and was a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate.

Dr. Haass also was vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, the Sol M. Linowitz visiting professor of international studies at Hamilton College, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. A Rhodes scholar, Dr. Haass holds a BA from Oberlin College and Master and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Oxford University. He has received honorary degrees from Hamilton College, Franklin & Marshall College, Georgetown University, Oberlin College, Central College, and Miami Dade College.

Dr. Richard Haass was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

See Dr. Richard Haass, Council on Foreign Relations, Bio.

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Dr. Haass is the author of books including:

Foreign Policy Begins at Home

The Case for Putting America’s House in Order

Overview

The biggest threat to the United States comes not from abroad but from within. This is the unexpected message of Council on Foreign Relations President Richard N. Haass in Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order.

“Many of the foundations of this country’s power are eroding,” he warns. “The effect, however, is not limited to a deteriorating transportation system or jobs that go unfilled or overseas owing to a lack of qualified American workers. To the contrary, shortcomings here at home directly threaten America’s ability to project power and exert influence overseas, to compete in the global marketplace, to generate the resources needed to promote the full range of US interests abroad, and to set a compelling example that will influence the thinking and behavior of others.”

A rising China, climate change, terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a turbulent Middle East, and a reckless North Korea all present serious challenges. But, Haass argues, U.S. national security depends even more on the United States addressing its crumbling infrastructure, second-class schools, outdated immigration system, and burgeoning debt, something that will require controlling entitlements rather than just raising taxes and cutting discretionary spending.

Haass rejects both isolationism and the notion of American decline. But he contends the country is underperforming at home and overreaching abroad. He argues that the United States must sharply limit its role in humanitarian interventions and in wars of choice designed to remake other societies, as was tried unsuccessfully in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, it should emphasize maintaining the balance of power in Asia, advancing North American economic integration and energy self-sufficiency, and promoting collective responses to global challenges.

The world is no longer dominated by one or more superpowers. Instead, the paramount feature of international relations in the first half of the twenty-first century is nonpolarity; power has been diffused, spread among an enormous list of entities capable in their own right to exert their influence. In addition to traditional nation-states, there are many other entities active in the political sphere, whether global (UN, World Bank), regional (European Union, NATO, Arab League), commercial (JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil), disruptive, or altruistic. This world is relatively forgiving, however, with no great rival directly threatening American interests.

How long this strategic respite lasts and how well the nation continues to fare on the global stage, according to Haass, will depend largely on whether the United States puts its own house in order.

See Richard N. Haass, Foreign Policy Begins at Home, Book Overview.

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Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University

He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, and is a former member and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists, and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, has been a University Professor since 2003, and is the Co-Chair of the University’s Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute as well as the Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz has over 40 honorary doctorates and at least eight honorary professorships, as well as an honorary deanship.  In 2009 the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the Chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals, and Commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system.

Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world, and in 2011 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Stiglitz’s work focuses on income distribution, asset risk management, corporate governance, and international trade, and is the author of ten books, with his latest, The Price of Inequality (2012), hitting The New York Times best seller list.

See, Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, Wiki.

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Stiglitz is the author of books including:

The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. (2012)

A forceful argument against America’s vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize–winning economist.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.” 

Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable: moneyed interests compound their wealth by stifling true, dynamic capitalism. They have made America the most unequal advanced industrial country while crippling growth, trampling on the rule of law, and undermining democracy. The result: a divided society that cannot tackle its most pressing problems. With characteristic insight, Stiglitz examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

See, Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2012).

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Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. (2010)

The New York Times bestseller: “A lucid account” (New York Times) of the recent financial crisis and the way forward by the Nobel Prize-winning economist, with a new afterword.

The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression. Flawed government policy and unscrupulous personal and corporate behavior in the United States created the current financial meltdown, which was exported across the globe with devastating consequences. The crisis has sparked an essential debate about America’s economic missteps, the soundness of this country’s economy, and even the appropriate shape of a capitalist system.

Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.”

Ranging across a host of topics that bear on the crisis, Stiglitz argues convincingly for a restoration of the balance between government and markets. America as a nation faces huge challenges—in health care, energy, the environment, education, and manufacturing—and Stiglitz penetratingly addresses each in light of the newly emerging global economic order. An ongoing war of ideas over the most effective type of capitalist system, as well as a rebalancing of global economic power, is shaping that order. The battle may finally give the lie to theories of a “rational” market or to the view that America’s global economic dominance is inevitable and unassailable.

For anyone watching with indignation while a reckless Wall Street destroyed homes, educations, and jobs; while the government took half-steps hoping for a “just-enough” recovery; and while bankers fell all over themselves claiming not to have seen what was coming, then sought government bailouts while resisting regulation that would make future crises less likely, Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future.

See, Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2010).

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William McDonough is a globally recognized leader in sustainable development. Trained as an architect, McDonough’s interests and influence range widely, and he works at scales from the global to the molecular.

Time magazine recognized him in 1999 as a “Hero for the Planet,” stating that “his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that-in demonstrable and practical ways-is changing the design of the world.” In 1996, McDonough received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the nation’s highest environmental honor, and in 2003 he earned the first U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his work with Shaw Industries, the carpet division of Berkshire Hathaway. In 2004, he received the National Design Award for exemplary achievement in the field of environmental design.

McDonough is the architect of many of the recognized flagships of sustainable design, including the Ford Rouge truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan; the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College; and NASA’s new “space station on Earth,” Sustainability Base, completed in 2011.

He has written and lectured extensively on design as the first signal of human intention. He was commissioned in 1991 to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability as guidelines for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000, still recognized two decades after publication as a touchstone of sustainable design. In 2002, McDonough and the German chemist Dr. Michael Braungart co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which is widely acknowledged as a seminal text of the sustainability movement.

McDonough advises major enterprises including commercial and governmental leaders worldwide through McDonough Advisors. He also is active with William McDonough + Partners, his architecture practice with offices in Charlottesville, Virginia, and San Francisco, as well as McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, the Cradle to Cradle® consulting firm co-founded with Braungart. He has co-founded, with Braungart, not for profit organizations to allow public accessibility to Cradle to Cradle thinking. These include GreenBlue (2000), to convene industry groups around Cradle to Cradle issues, and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (2009), founded at the invitation of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to create a global standard for the development of safe and healthy products. He and Braungart contributed the Cradle to Cradle certification program to the Institute. McDonough also co-founded Make It Right (2006) with Brad Pitt to bring affordable, Cradle to Cradle-inspired homes to the New Orleans Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina.

See, William McDonough.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University.

He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. Sachs is also one of the Secretary-General’s MDG Advocates, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Development. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty. His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s population. For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He also advised Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus. He works closely with international organizations including the African Union, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, among others.  …

For complete bio, see, Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Earth Institute, Columbia University.

In [The Price of Civilization], Jeffrey D. Sachs offers a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills, and an urgent call for Americans to restore the core virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.

Sachs finds that both political parties—and many leading economists—have missed the big picture, profoundly underestimating globalization’s long-term effects and offering shortsighted solutions.  He describes a political system that is beholden to big donors and influential lobbyists and a consumption-driven culture that suffers shortfalls of social trust and compassion.  He bids readers to reclaim the virtues of good citizenship and mindfulness toward the economy and each one another.  Most important, he urges each of us to accept the price of civilization, so that together we restore America to its great promise.

The Price of Civilization is a masterly road map for prosperity, founded on America’s deepest values and on a rigorous understanding of the twenty-first-century world economy.

See, The Price of Civilization, Random House 2011.

In Common Wealth, Jeffrey D. Sachs – one of the world’s most respected economists and the author of The New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty - offers an urgent assessment of the environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity.

Through crystalline examination of hard facts, Sachs predicts the cascade of crises that awaits this crowded planet-and presents a program of sustainable development and international cooperation that will correct this dangerous course.

Few luminaries anywhere on the planet are as schooled in this daunting subject as Sachs, and this is the vital product of his experience and wisdom.

See, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Penguin 2009.

In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey D. Sachs draws on his entire twenty-five-year body of experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring big-picture vision of the keys to economic success in the world today and the steps that are necessary to achieve prosperity for all.

Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall.  Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty.

The groundwork laid, he explains his methods for arriving, like a clinical internist, at a holistic diagnosis of a country’s situation and the options it faces. Rather than deliver a worldview to readers from on high, Sachs leads them along the learning path he himself followed, telling the remarkable stories of his own work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China, and Africa as a way to bring readers to a broad-based understanding of the array of issues countries can face and the way the issues interrelate.

He concludes by drawing on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back. In the end, he leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world’s problems are, but how solvable they are—and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest.

A work of profound moral and intellectual vision that grows out of unprecedented real-world experience, The End of Poverty is a road map to a safer, more prosperous future for the world.

See, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin 2006.

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David Brooks’s column on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” He is the author of “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” and “On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense,” both published by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983, and worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times.

He is also a frequent analyst on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the “Diane Rehm Show.” His articles have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, the Washington Post, the TLS, Commentary, The Public Interest and many other magazines. He is editor of the anthology “Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing” (Vintage Books).

See David Brooks, Columnist Biography, NYT.

David Brooks also writes a blog which can be found here.

David Brooks writes of his 2011 book:

This is the happiest story you’ll ever read. It’s about two people who lead wonderfully fulfilling lives.

Most success stories are told at the surface level of life. They describe getting good grades, learning certain skills, getting the right jobs and learning the right techniques to get ahead. This story is told one level down, at the level of emotions, intuitions, biases, and deep inner longings, where character is formed and the seeds of accomplishment grow.

It’s possible to tell this story now because over the past thirty years, an array of researchers have peered into the inner mind. I’ve woven their findings into the lives of two characters–Erica and Harold. Through their story you’ll come away with a new perspective on who you are, on how we raise our kids, conduct business, teach, love, and practice politics.

We’re not rational animals or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with one another and connect to large ideas.

See David Brooks, The Social Animal, Random House. 

George Lakoff – Professor, University of California, Berkeley

“George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972).  He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.”

See, George Lakoff, About.

“[H]e is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society.  He is particularly famous for his association with the concept of the embodied mind, which he has written about in relation to mathematics. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain’s Socialist Party’s think tank.  He was the founder of the now defunct progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute.”

See, George Lakoff, Wiki.

Professor Lakoff has written numerous books and papers including the following:

THE POLITICAL MIND (2008)

“In his new book, Lakoff spells out what cognitive science has discovered about reason, and reveals that human reason is far more interesting than we thought it was. Reason is physical, mostly unconscious, metaphorical, emotion-laden, and tied to empathy-and there are biological explanations behind our moral and political thought processes. His call for a New Enlightenment is a bold and striking challenge to the cherished beliefs not only of philosophers, but of pundits, pollsters, and political leaders. The Political Mind is a passionate, erudite, and groundbreaking book that will appeal to anyone interested in how the mind works and how we function socially and politically.”

See, George Lakoff, Books.

WHOSE FREEDOM? THE BATTLE OVER AMERICA’S MOST IMPORTANT IDEA (2007)

““Freedom” is one of the most contested words in American political discourse. In Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea, George Lakoff describes how the country is divided by two dramatically different worldviews, cognitive frames that determine how we think about economic policy, religion, science, foreign affairs—and freedom.”

See, George Lakoff, Books.

MORAL POLITICS: HOW LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES THINK (2002)

“In this classic text, the first full-scale application of cognitive science to politics, George Lakoff analyzes the unconscious and rhetorical worldviews of liberals and conservatives, discovering radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. For this new edition, Lakoff adds a preface and an afterword extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book’s original publication, from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath.”

See, George Lakoff, Books.

Thomas Piketty - Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics

“Thomas Piketty is a French economist who specializes in the study of economic inequality.  …  [He] taught economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1993 to 1995. In 1995, he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a researcher, and in 2000 he became director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).”  He was the first head of the Paris School of Economics, after spending three years creating it. 

“Picketty and Emmanuel Saez] were named two of the 2012 FP Top 100 Global Thinkers ”for making the graph that occupied Wall Street.”

See, Thomas Piketty, Wiki.