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49. Mark Willes, 38, is the youngest of the Federal Reserve's twelve regional bank presidents. He is also the most independent and outspoken. As chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, which oversees the North Central states, Willes has frequently been at odds with the other Fed regional presidents and the Fed's former chairman G. William Miller. A Utah-born Mormon who attended Columbia University, Willes argues that forecasts about the impact of new economic policies are so imprecise that the Fed should resist trying to make constant short-term adjustments by changing the money supply. Instead he advocates a new hands-off approach known as the theory of "rational expectations," which contends that longterm, stable monetary policies encourage public confidence and hence lead to increased economic growth. Though Willes has had little influence on the Fed's thinking, his arguments are reaching businessmen and commercial bankers.
50. Garry Wills, 45, is a writer and columnist who defies tidy labeling. He carefully disengages himself from the right wing in America, which he claims is simply an "amalgam" of individualism in economic affairs. He is skeptical that the political system can produce beneficial change and looks instead to forces "from the principled minority." Wills, who spent six years in a Catholic seminary, says that "the Gospel's concerns are the ones that seem to me to be conservative in the right sense: concern for the poor, concern for peace, concern for social harmony." A humanities professor at Johns Hopkins and a classics scholar, Wills has written scathingly of Richard Nixon (Nixon Agonistes) and brilliantly of Thomas Jefferson (Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence). His latest work: Confessions of a Conservative. Wills' column appears in 70 newspapers.