Well we have two objective measures.

Four criteria seem to be essential

The final two criteria inflation and interest rates are also a mess.

By that standard, he would not have wanted Sarkozy.

Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is and they're listed here.

All his predecessors have been all those three, and that's the point I was trying to make.

Shareholder value was dismissed as a fad and a fraud.

There seem to be two particularly important criteria for great leadership, both noted by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Given this, China s leaders have decided to stop using GDP growth as the primary criterion for evaluating officials performance.

To make the quality of the banking system a new criterion for euro membership is not only hypocritical it is also counterproductive.

Nor is it the result of the collapse of a speculation fueled asset bubble, the violation of the Maastricht criteria, ballooning debt, or greedy banks.

All are within our grasp they are all, in different ways, being pursued, but without any basic criteria guiding their application.

Today, for example, Europeans travel to the US to purchase human eggs from young women chosen on the basis of their presumed genetic characteristics.

As one would expect, there is no criterion, not even a theory, for determining when the use of force carries an excessive cost to civilian bystanders.

The hardest challenge is redefining the fiscal criterion, but one thing is clear it would be absurd if candidates had to pass a test that was never applied after entry.

Most critically, the ECB has de emphasized in its Policy Position the former 2.25 fluctuation band in the ERM II as the criterion for assessing exchange rate stability. This corresponds to the view shared by many accession countries that such a narrow band would increase the risks in managing the run up to adopting the euro.

Most critically, the ECB has de emphasized in its Policy Position the former 2.25 fluctuation band in the ERM II as the criterion for assessing exchange rate stability.

These cannot be identi cal to scientific method, but they should be similar in character, enshrining the pursuit of truth as the criteria on which political views are to be judged.

I don t want a good General, I want a lucky one the French Emperor Napoleon I used to quip. By that standard, he would not have wanted Sarkozy.

Consider the long war, a bold concept embraced a few years ago to describe the continuing struggle against terrorism, the grudging progress that could realistically be achieved, and the enormous financial burden that it would impose for years to come. It was also a realpolitik acknowledgement of the setbacks to be expected along the way (the slog, as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it).

If one takes unemployment as the ultimate criterion, the European welfare state has brought a safety net to the middle class, but has mired 10 of its most vulnerable people in permanent welfare dependency.

It was also a realpolitik acknowledgement of the setbacks to be expected along the way (the slog, as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it).

Instead of exploiting the current opportunity of unprecedented leverage over euro candidates to push them to meet the Maastricht criteria, euro incumbents are contemplating a new and exceedingly vague criterion based on the quality of banking systems.

But the rankings change if you make output per capita (a better measure of a country's economic well being) the standard here the US comes first, and France and Germany drop, respectively, to 16th and 11th place.