Running fast
Nov 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition

China and India have much to offer the world of technology, argues Simon Cox (interviewed here), but more still to gain from it

The Royal Society

TOWARDS the end of the 11th century, while tardy Europeans kept time with sundials, Su Sung of China completed his masterpiece: a water clock of great intricacy and accuracy. Standing almost 12 metres (40 feet) tall, Su's “Cosmic Engine” wavered, it is said, by only a few minutes in every 24 hours. From twin tanks filled by servants, a steady flow of water was cupped and spilled by a series of buckets mounted on a wheel. The rotation of the wheel turned the clock, as well as an astronomical sphere and globe that charted the movement of the sun, moon and planets. Drums beat 100 times a day; bells chimed every two hours. A replica, painstakingly built with contemporary methods, now turns in Taiwan's National Museum of Natural Science.

Clockmaking was only one scientific endeavour in which China and India comfortably led the world before the 15th century. China outstripped Europe in its understanding of hydraulics, ironsmelting and shipbuilding. Its machines for ginning cotton, spinning ramie and throwing silk seemed to lack only a flying shuttle and a drawbar to match the 18th-century contraptions that launched Britain's Industrial Revolution. Clean your teeth with a toothbrush, rebuff the rain with a collapsible umbrella, turn a playing card, light a match, write, pay—or even wipe your behind—with paper, and you register a debt to China's powers of invention.

India's genius, then as now, was in software not hardware. Its ancient civilisations ushered in a “mathematical revolution” from the fifth century, when Aryabhata devised something like the decimal system. In the seventh century Brahmagupta explained that a number multiplied by zero was zero. By the 15th century, Madhava had calculated pi to more than ten decimal places.

After the 15th century, however, the technological clock stopped in both countries, even as it accelerated in Europe. This peculiar loss of momentum, noted Joseph Needham, a great historian of Chinese science, takes some explaining. Why, he asked, did the science of Galileo emerge “in Pisa but not in Patna or Peking”?

In his book “The Lever of Riches”, Joel Mokyr settles on a simple explanation for China's technological stagnation: the country's imperial state lost interest. Its purposes were better served by continuity than by progress, and there was no rival source of power and patronage to pick up the threads it dropped. Roddam Narasimha of India's National Institute of Advanced Studies reaches a similar conclusion for India. “Up to the 18th century, the East in general was strong and prosperous, the status quo was comfortable, and there was no great internal pressure to change the global order,” he writes.

That diffidence no longer hampers either state. Both China and India are now restless with technological ambition. China's government does not have the luxury of choosing between progress and stability; it cannot enjoy social peace without economic advance. For the past 30 years it has tried to turn the clock forward. By 2015 its research scientists and engineers may outnumber those of any other country. By 2020 it aims to spend a bigger share of its GDP on research and development (R&D) than the European Union.

India, for its part, surveys the future with uncharacteristic optimism. Its technological confidence has grown immeasurably thanks to the success of its software and IT firms. The heirs to Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, India's digital ambassadors have won acclaim for their mastery of ones as well as zeros.

But even as India's technological powers make a splash in the world, they stir only the surface of its own vast society. India produces more engineering graduates than America. But it has only 24 personal computers for every 1,000 people, and fewer than three broadband connections. India's billion-strong population cuts both ways. Whenever an Indian demographic appears as a numerator, the resulting number looks big. But whenever its population is in the denominator, the number looks small. It is like looking at the same phenomenon from opposite ends of a telescope. As of now, India matters more to technology than technology does to India.

This is a pity. India and China still have more to gain from the adoption and assimilation of technology than from invention per se. Some of their best minds are adding generously to the world's stock of knowledge, but the more urgent task for the countries themselves is to make wider use of know-how that already exists. Indeed, the World Bank has calculated that India could quintuple the size of its economy if it only caught up with itself—that is, if the mediocre firms in its industries closed the gap with the best. Both countries miss out when policies to promote invention, such as China's push for “indigenous” innovation or India's recent patent laws, serve to stymie diffusion.

A year in China, foreign residents say, is like ten years outside. Its clock is already turning rapidly. But the cogs and levers that drive technological progress are as intricate and delicate as Su Sung's mechanism. China's government is in danger of trying to do too much. Its monumental efforts to educate and train have filled the tanks of its innovation engine. Now it is time for it just to let the water flow.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

November 2, 2007
SEOUL JOURNAL
A New Lifestyle in South Korea: First Weekends, and Now Brunch

By SU HYUN LEE
SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 1 — When she returned to Seoul in 2000 after 10 years in New York City, Park Su-ji introduced her fellow South Koreans to an exotic way to socialize over food: brunch.

“I really missed brunch but didn’t find any brunch restaurants,” Ms. Park said. So in the spring of 2005 she opened Suji’s, which serves toasted bagels and blueberry pancakes, among other brunch staples, in a setting that features black-and-white photographs of the Chrysler Building and Union Square in New York.

Ms. Park said that she had thought her restaurant would primarily attract Western expatriates. But two years later, scores of restaurants in Seoul offer or even specialize in brunch — and they are filled with South Koreans. Restaurant owners and local newspapers say there may be as many as 200 such restaurants.

The sudden embrace of the leisurely late-morning repast reflects greater exposure to Western customs and cuisines as more South Koreans travel, work and study abroad. But it also is related to a watershed development at home: the mandatory weekend.

For decades South Korean governments have stressed hard work and making money, which has helped to turn the country’s economy into one of the most robust in the world. But starting in 2004, the government began shortening the official workweek from six days to five. Now, all enterprises with 50 or more employees are required to provide two days off. By 2011, all companies must do so.

The discovery of the weekend has meant an explosion in new activities. Inns have opened up all over the country to accommodate overnight excursions. The new opportunity for short trips to neighboring countries has helped catapult South Koreans to the top ranks of tourists in the region.

The unaccustomed free time has also meant that South Koreans can start indulging themselves like the young New Yorkers they had been watching in syndicated television sitcoms like “Sex and the City,” whose characters always seemed to be whiling away enjoyable hours over brunch.

Now, on weekends female friends, male buddies, couples, parents with toddlers and three-generation families all line up outside crowded brunch restaurants like Suji’s, Butterfinger Pancakes, Tell Me About It, Flying Pan Blue, Stove and All Day Brunch. Some restaurants are so packed that reservations must be made days in advance. Once inside, if they can get inside, people spend two to three hours chatting away.

“Before the five-day workweek started, we were always tired after drinking until late, because nighttime was the only time to socialize,” said Suh Yang-ho, a 29-year-old who was having brunch with a colleague one recent Saturday at Stove.

“I think it’s healthier to relax like this over home-cooked-style food in the late mornings,” said Mr. Suh, who works at Credit Suisse in Seoul.

His colleague Choi Hey-rung, 30, gave another reason for preferring brunch. “I don’t want to cook,” she said. “So on Sundays, I bring my family, including my parents-in-law, to brunch a little after noon.”

Traditionally, married Korean women have stayed home with their families; they did not go out with friends on weekends. Now, married as well as single women avoid cooking when they can and are leading the move toward eating out. They regularly get together with friends over brunch. Daughters are introducing their mothers to this laid-back way of passing a weekend morning. Wives are trying to get their husbands to appreciate the leisurely lifestyle it represents.

On a recent Sunday, Han Kye-soon, 29, was catching up with three other single women at a corner table at Suji’s.

“I feel like a New Yorker or a Parisian, like the characters of ‘Sex and the City,’” said Ms. Han, a pottery designer.

What makes the brunch fashion somewhat surprising is that Koreans tend to be reluctant to try non-Korean foods. Even when traveling abroad, they gravitate toward kimchi (fermented vegetables) and bibimpap (rice with vegetables and chili paste). Eating steak and potatoes with knives and forks can be considered an act of sophistication.

Brunch is popular even though some Koreans do not really like the food served at the meal: eggs and bacon, pancakes and toast are all a marked contrast to the usual Korean breakfast of rice, soup and vegetables. The portions are huge by Korean standards. And brunch can be expensive, typically around 25,000 won, or $27.50.

Will the brunch boom last? Clearly it has not taken with some people here.

On a recent Sunday, Jegal Min-jung, 22, and her parents were sitting at a table in the middle of Suji’s. Fashionably world-weary patrons occupied seats by the wide-open windows, while young couples perched on high bar stools.

Ms. Jegal, who had heard about Suji’s from a friend, had wanted to experience brunch with her parents.

Her mother, Kang Deok-hee, had agreed: “It sounded like it would be less greasy than other Western food, like steak with gravy.”

Wishing to sample a variety of dishes from the English-language-only menu, the family ordered eggs sunny side up with toast and sausages; blueberry pancakes; and egg salad with fried potatoes and a toasted bagel. But the time it was taking for all that food to show up tested the father’s patience.

After steaming silently for some time, the father, Jegal Yoon, shouted to the waiter to serve the food more speedily.

“Bring each dish when it’s ready,” he said. “I’m busy and need to leave as soon as possible.”

His wife made a face, then smiled. She explained, “My husband has to go to work after this.”

Meet 'The Decider' of Tehran. It's Not the Hothead You Expect.
By Vali Nasr
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B01

When most Americans think of Iran, they probably think of its incendiary president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Since his election in 2005, Ahmadinejad has gleefully shocked the world with his defiance over Iran's nuclear programs, his ravings about a Shiite messiah, his jeremiads against Israel and his denial that the Holocaust occurred. But while Ahmadinejad is surely the regime's face, he's not its boss. Since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death in 1989, the real power in Tehran has belonged to Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad makes the noise, but Khamenei pulls the strings.

It's not just ordinary citizens who assume that Ahmadinejad calls the shots in Tehran. Last Tuesday, as President Bush tried to explain away a new National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran had shuttered its nuclear-weapons program in 2003, he argued at an awkward news conference that his administration's "carrot-and-stick approach" toward Iran had been working -- "until Ahmadinejad came in." But under the Iranian system, a president matters far less than the supreme leader. For all Ahmadinejad's bluster, he is not "the decider." It's the unelected and unaccountable Khamenei who sits atop Iran's labyrinthine political structure. He gets the last word on whether Iran should try to get the bomb or try to talk to the United States. So to deal with Iran, the West must get to know Khamenei.

The supreme leader is an enigma even to most of Iran's 70 million people. In fact, he's far more cautious, conservative and pragmatic than the bellowing Ahmadinejad. Khamenei wants a "Goldilocks" kind of Islamic Republic -- not too hot, not too cold. He's reluctant to tilt too far in any one direction and keen to keep squabbling factions on board. He says that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic but heartily approves of the knowledge and fuel required to build them. And he is even willing to work with the United States to bring stability to Afghanistan and Iraq -- as long as Iran gets to expand its regional influence by keeping its feeble neighbors under its thumb.

Born in 1939, Khamenei followed his father into the ranks of the Shiite clergy and soon joined Khomeini's radical Islamic movement to topple the stifling monarchy led by the shah. For years, Khamenei lived underground or in jail. When revolution erupted in 1979, he emerged as one of Khomeini's chief lieutenants, and he became president of the new Islamic Republic two years later. Like many other firebrand clerics of the time, he was more a child of revolution than a scholar of religion, more at home on the barricades than in the seminary. Khamenei was then a leftist by temperament, well read in the literature of dissent that circulated in Iran and the Arab world. He even translated into Persian the works of the Egyptian extremist Sayyid Qutb, the Sunni intellectual who became the godfather of al-Qaeda and radical Islam in the Arab world.

Khamenei was a very different type of president from Ahmadinejad, a turbanless layman. Khamenei also gave fiery speeches before the U.N. General Assembly, but unlike Ahmadinejad, he never regaled the world body with mystical tales about the return of the "Hidden Imam," a messianic figure whose reappearance is said to herald the apocalypse. In government circles, Khamenei was known as a policy wonk with a keen interest in defense matters, budget reports and administrative details. He guided Iran through its long, bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s, bonding with many now-powerful Revolutionary Guards. He won some additional street cred in 1981, when he lost the use of his right arm during an assassination attempt by terrorists from Mujaheddin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group now under U.S. military protection in Iraq. When the revered Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei became the compromise choice to succeed him.

Khamenei transformed the top job, taking many of the powers of the presidency with him and turning the office of the supreme leader into the omnipotent overseer of Iran's political scene. Today, mandarins around him manage the interplay among the country's bickering centers of power: the parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the military, the intelligence services, the police agencies, the clerical elite, the Friday prayer leaders and much of the media, not to mention a constellation of formal and informal foundations, organizations, councils, seminaries and business associations.

That all makes him an unusual sort of dictator. He has a down-to-earth image and calm demeanor that sit uneasily with the praise he often heaps upon Iran's militants. His austere lifestyle stands in jarring contrast to the corruption and ostentatious wealth of many other Iranian leaders.

For Iran's top cleric, 0Khamenei also has scant religious authority -- a surprising deficiency for the chief of a theocracy and a stark departure from Khomeini. Most Shiites in Iran and abroad now look elsewhere for spiritual guidance, to a handful of bookish ayatollahs or to neighboring Iraq's most respected Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. All this has made the supreme leadership into an office that's far more political and Iran-focused than had been intended by Khomeini, who wanted to run not merely a country but a pan-Islamic revolution.

So how does Khamenei get along with Ahmadinejad? For now, at least, the supreme leader is standing behind his demagogic president. Khamenei decidedly prefers the populist, hard-line Ahmadinejad to his relatively moderate predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. The supreme leader frustrated Khatami's attempts at reform and ensured that Ahmadinejad (then Tehran's mayor) would win the 2005 presidential elections. Khamenei has praised Ahmadinejad's administration as the best yet, partly because the two men share a soft spot for militant types and dream of rekindling the revolutionary fervor of the Islamic Republic's early days. The supreme leader even seems to find Ahmadinejad's theatrics useful for keeping up revolutionary appearances and endearing Iran to the Arab world.

Still, the two men's agendas differ. Ahmadinejad, for example, aspires to be more than a mere administrator. Khamenei, however, already holds all the power he wants and merely needs to keep it away from ambitious presidents, whether hard-line or reformist. Moreover, Ahmadinejad's brand of rabble-rousing may be a useful strategy for a newcomer trying to elbow his way toward greater influence within the tangles of the Iranian political system, but it has deepened Iran's isolation abroad in ways Khamenei resents. For instance, he bristled during Ahmadinejad's December 2005 visit to Mecca, when the president embarrassed his welcoming host, Saudi King Abdullah, with a Holocaust-denying, anti-Israel harangue. Closer to home, when Ahmadinejad recently had the country's former top nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, arrested on espionage charges, an irked Khamenei made sure that the judiciary dismissed the charges.

So Khamenei is keeping his options open. He has helped boost Ahmadinejad's rivals in the 2005 race, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, by giving the former's Expediency Council (a key clerical panel) more powers and by backing the latter's bid to become Tehran's mayor. Both men remain serious contenders for power and take every opportunity to snipe at Ahmadinejad. So do a growing number of Iran's elite, who abhor Ahmadinejad's mismanagement of the economy and fear that his bluster has increased the chances of war with the United States. The president's foes hope to drub him in the parliamentary elections coming up in March.

Meanwhile, the decider is getting old. As Khamenei pushes 70, rumors abound that his health is deteriorating. One of the usually dull elections to the Council of Experts, the mysterious body that will choose his successor, recently turned into a closely watched race. (Moderates won.) Still, experts can only guess at who will follow Khamenei -- and about whether Iran's next supreme leader will reign supreme.

For now, Khamenei sees enemies all around: dissidents at home eager to reform the Islamic Republic out of existence, Sunni Arab states galvanized by the rise of Iranian influence, a Bush administration still obsessed with regime change despite last week's National Intelligence Estimate painting Tehran as toothless. Khamenei's greatest fear has always been that his enemies at home and abroad would join forces. (Little wonder, then, that he rejected talking to the United States when it looked as though the Clinton administration wanted to engage only Khatami and the reformists whom the supreme leader so fears.) Khamenei has done a nasty, effective job of sidelining the reformists, but he still faces the challenge of the United States.

In the past, Khamenei has not been averse to talking to Washington. He gave tacit support to an ill-fated memo offering direct U.S.-Iranian talks in 2003, and a year later, he publicly endorsed discussions over Iraq. But times changed after Iran dug in its heels over the nuclear issue and found itself looking down the barrels of U.S. guns. The threat of war has abated after this dramatic week, but for the man who rules Iran, two overriding concerns linger: ensuring that his regime survives and ensuring that he remains at the head of it. As the National Intelligence Estimate itself put it, "Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs." But Tehran's decisions are also guided by one man, and anyone serious about understanding the sources of Iranian conduct needs to keep an eye on him.

vali.nasr@yahoo.com

Vali Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, is the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future."

Intel Insider: Iran Report Ain't Political
By Noah Shachtman December 06, 2007 | 1:41:41 PMCategories: Cloak And Dagger, Mullah Menace, Nukes, Politricks
Michael Tanji spent nearly 20 years in the U.S. intelligence community, working in signals intelligence, human intelligence, and document exploitation for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. In this post, he takes on John Bolton, Norman Podhorertz and others who are accusing the new intelligence report on Iran as being some kind of political dirty trick, played on Administration hawks.
Unlike most of the people commenting on the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, I've actually contributed to a number of National Intelligence Council-commissioned assessments. Over the years my role varied, but I have a pretty solid understanding of the process and I hope this proves to be useful in the debate.
For starters, ignore the part of any story that talks about NIE's being a consensus document of the 16 agencies in the intelligence community. For any given assessment, maybe a dozen agencies are active participants in the process. If you're writing about a technical threat from a nation-state in Asia, the Coast Guard isn't going to have a lot to add. For a study on Iran's nuclear capabilities you can be fairly confident that between eight and a dozen agencies showed up and played major roles.
Secondly, reports that the NIE was drafted by people with a known political agenda – or acute cases of Bush Derangement Syndrome – make for entertaining political hay, but it has been my experience that the principle drafters of such assessments come from one lead agency, not the executives at the top of the food chain. Anyone who can prove that partisan hacks cherry picked the intelligence information they wanted and then strong-armed the rest of the community to go along with their conclusions would have a bombshell on their hands. These executives do play an important role in the NIE process, which I'll address later.
Finally, building an NIE is not unlike any other bureaucratic exercise that involves multiple agencies of the government. Competing opinions are argued, disputes are mediated, and dissent noted. At the end of the day a deliverable is due – the rough draft – and the involved parties get to sit at their home offices for a period of time, ruminate on the work, and forward to the principle drafter their comments, edits, suggestions and recommendations. What follows are several rounds of review and edit sessions with increasingly more senior members of the agencies involved and the National Intelligence Council, until the final draft is ready for review, approval and dissemination.
===
I spent almost 20 years in the intelligence community and I have absolutely no idea what the political affiliation or disposition of any of my colleagues or superiors were. No one talked politics; we talked data, methodology and analysis. The idea that a dozen-odd people would sit down for days at a time concocting a piece of work that was purely designed to thwart the efforts of a given administration is more than a little absurd. I have no doubt that I worked with people who did not agree with the Executive's agenda (regardless of who the Executive was at any given time), but you show up to these things with data and arguments you can defend; you show up with political party talking points and you're going to catch an intellectual beating. Time to circle back to the role that the most senior members of the community play in efforts like an NIE. Once all the grunt work is done, a National Intelligence Officer – the leading analyst in the NIC on a particular issue – gets to craft the final version of the assessment. It is at this point that subtle yet powerful changes to verbiage by a political partisan could potentially undue sound analytical work, but here is the rub: for every leaker promoting the partisan interpretation, there should be someone reaching out to a reporter friendly to the other side of the political spectrum to call foul. Anyone who thinks intelligence analysts are introverted bookworms who won't come close to blows when someone messes with their work doesn't know the intelligence business.
===
So what is a more likely explanation for this drastically new assessment?
Whether it is new photographs, new human sources, or new signals intercepts, the fact that just two years ago, indeed just a few months ago, we were confident that the exact opposite of what the latest NIE says Iran is up to suggests that either we have multiple, unimpeachable sources of intelligence that have shown us the light; or the information we have is all over the map and drawing definitive conclusions is next to impossible. That our intelligence services have rarely penetrated a hard target like Iran, and the fact that the intelligence community has missed a laundry list of major strategic developments around the world, suggests the latter case is more likely. I am always willing to hope for the best, but the historical pattern is hard to ignore.
If there is a bias being exerted here it is a bias driven by intellectual and professional fear and less raw politics. That may be parsing to some, but I think the distinction is important. Regardless of where an intelligence officer falls out on the political spectrum, none of them can stand being the experts that never get anything right (or more accurately, have their failures so publicly exposed). I've been as guilty as anyone in the business: I knew secrets, I should have been able to make better calls that people who did not, but often times I did not. So the dramatic shift in the NIE may have less to do with any killer piece of new information and everything to do with the fact that the community is in a mindset that has them prepared to do anything (anything but apply a full-court intel press against hard targets – and pay the associated human cost) to avoid being exposed as ineffective. In an age of information, spending ~$40 billion a year for 150 pages of "maybe yes, maybe no" isn't a situation that is going to stand for long.
In the end the real story of this NIE will not be known from some time, but that will not prevent those on either side of the political spectrum from using it to score political points. Ignore the hype and rhetoric and read the key judgments carefully for yourself. Assume everything used to construct the work is accurate and base your own assessment on the language used: do you feel highly confident?
-- Michael Tanji, cross-posted at Haft of the Spear

A National Crisis of Confidence
By Nikki Schwab
Posted November 12, 2007

Corrected on 12/10/07: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported poll data relating to public perceptions of media bias. In fact, 78 percent of respondents said the media are biased; of that group, 52 percent said the media are too liberal, and 27 percent believed the media are too conservative.


(Rob Cady-USN&WR)
In addition, researchers at the Center for Public Leadership now believe the poll number relating to confidence in the entertainment industry may be inaccurately low.

Talk about a tough crowd. Americans have steadily lost confidence in their leaders since 2005—the year the government bungled its handling of Hurricane Katrina—according to the third annual Center for Public Leadership/U.S. News poll conducted this fall. More than three quarters of the respondents say they believe the country is going through a leadership crisis, up 7 percent from last year, a trend stretching across all demographic and political groups. Nearly 80 percent feel that unless it gets better leaders, the country will decline, while 51 percent believe that the United States is already falling behind other nations. And about two thirds say that today's leaders pale in comparison with those of 20 years ago.

That's a sobering critique, but given the dismal approval ratings of President Bush and Congress, these results aren't too surprising. "A lot of leaders are really impotent in changing the direction of things," says Brown University Prof. Arnold Ludwig, author of a book on political leadership. He points specifically to Congress. "People are frustrated as to why the Democrats can't stop the war, why they can't curb the president. Leaders are supposed to get things done."

Poll respondents certainly reflect that frustration. Only 9 percent say they have a great deal of confidence in Congress's leadership. The executive branch fares somewhat better with 19 percent.

Broad discontent. It's not just political leaders who are failing in the eyes of citizens. Wall Street ties with Congress in its low ranking, followed by the media, which many consider tainted by bias. Seventy-eight percent believe the media are biased; of that group, 52 percent said the media are too liberal, and 27 percent thought they are too conservative. But the press escaped coming in last. That distinction goes to the entertainment industry, despite—or perhaps because of—its growing visibility in politics.

Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center, explains that shaky confidence often goes hand in hand with scandal. There's been plenty, with "Plamegate" and Sen. Larry Craig's restroom fiasco as two recent examples. "Scandals are the most public version of poor performance," Smith says.

So who earns the highest regard? Overwhelmingly, it's the nation's military leaders: Forty percent of respondents say they have a great deal of confidence in those who lead the armed forces.

There's some encouraging news even for political and business leaders. With a traditional sense of American optimism, a majority of people—59 percent—believe the country will have better leaders 20 years down the road. Almost half hope 2008 will start that trend, many saying it matters a great deal who becomes the next president. Whoever that is will be facing a crowd hungry to see results.

Tags: America's Best Leaders