Foreign Policy magazine has compiled a list of some of the best ideas from 2010. It’s an inspiring list that should make everyone feel a little more hopeful for the future of humanity.
And yet, all the bad news came with a surprising upside. Driven by the need to do more with less, the year’s boldest innovators turned up better, simpler ways to use our shrinking resources to improve global quality of life: ideas like creating demand for development so that poor people can better help themselves and handing money directly to those who need it, as well as new approaches to measuring and mapping that offer better, faster information about what aid needs to go where. This moment of global insecurity has also called into doubt some old shibboleths — not least that national borders as we know them are good and that resource wealth is bad.
In what sometimes looked like the worst of times, it was actually the best of times for ideas — and these ideas will shape how the world recovers in the years to come.