You are Malala Yousafzai, age 15. You have spent several years of your childhood advocating for girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, a place where many well-armed people do not look kindly upon this endeavor. A few weeks ago, while riding a school bus, you are shot in the face by a Taliban militant. You somehow manage to survive and are taken to a British hospital for rehabilitation. Ah, but there is a silver lining to this horror: you are named to Foreign Policy ’ s list of the top 100 “Global Thinkers.” You are in the top 10—along with...Paul Ryan!

Arguably the only things more superfluous than magazine lists (something that, yes, even this magazine has been known to offer up at times) are critiques of such lists. But this latest one from Foreign Policy—featured on the cover of its new issue—is worth reckoning with for what it says about elite reputation in our era, specifically about elite reputation’s durability in the face of contrary evidence.

And no one exemplifies this better than Ryan. After he was selected as Romney’s running mate, I took a closer look at how it was that the young Wisconsin congressman had developed a reputation as a big thinker, despite the fact that the numbers in his grand manifesto didn’t really add up and that his intellectual underpinnings seemed more Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged than Locke and Oakeshott. What I concluded was that Ryan recognized early on the value of being someone who can throw around numbers and policy in a Washington that has grown increasingly ignorant of such matters: “The upshot is that Washington now finds itself highly susceptible to doe-eyed young men brandishing graphs. What these ‘wonks’ propose doesn’t even have to add up or be scorable, as the case may be with the Ryan budget, because people who lack much policy knowledge themselves regard those who have it with a reflexive awe.” This dynamic was even stronger within Ryan’s party—as Republicans had grown more anti-government, they relied even more on people like Ryan who understood government enough to articulate the case for its dismantling.

There was a moment during the campaign when it looked like Ryan might have put all this at risk. His Tampa convention speech was so riddled with brazen elisions and deceptions that it threatened to overwhelm his reputation as the teller of hard truths; rather than making his pitch for painful Medicare reforms, Ryan spent the campaign echoing Mitt Romney’s attacks on the Medicare cost savings in Obamacare. Add in the amusing kerfuffle over vastly exaggerating his marathon time and it looked like Ryan might be seriously imperiling his hard-won image. But I suspected otherwise. I found, for one thing, that even in the day right after the convention speech, Ryan admirers like former Clinton budget chief Alice Rivlin were still willing to stick up for him, and that conservative champions like Bill Kristol and Vin Weber were willing to forgive the avoidance of entitlement reform.

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