The mainstream media has mostly marginalized left-wing voices, which is one reason why a progressive publication like the U.K.-based Prospect magazine enjoys a strong following.

Prospect and others are filling a void by bringing forward ideas that you won't see given much credence in the pages of the Economist, Globe and Mail, or Wall Street Journal.

It's as if there's an entirely parallel universe for those who prefer left-wing alternatives, such as Mother Jones or Truthdig.

This week, Prospect published a list of the world's top 10 thinkers, as chosen by its readership. And it includes several icons of the left—but not Noam Chomsky.

After nearly 3,000 votes were counted, the winner is French economist Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. His doorstopper of a book focused on how capitalism promotes greater inequality, citing reams of historical research.

Next on the list is Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and the new finance minister of Greece. He's forcefully challenged an austerity program imposed on his country by the European Union.

The only Canadian is author and activist Naomi Klein, who ranked third.

Her latest book, This Changes Everything, has forced many progressives to rethink how to address climate change. It includes an outstanding section on the risks of geo-engineering. This has been cited by some as a way out of a climate catastrophe by seeding the atmosphere with chemicals to reflect heat back into space.

As Klein astutely points out, geo-engineering will do nothing to stop ocean acidification. In addition, it will likely transform precipitation patterns, causing havoc with the monsoon that provides water to help feed the Indian subcontinent's population.

Klein's book also explains why the movement to divest from fossil-fuel companies is gaining so much traction.

Ranking a surprising fourth is comedian Russell Brand, who has emerged as a major voice of radicalism in Britain. His inclusion in the list was pooh-poohed by the British media. But anyone who watches his YouTube commentaries—billed as The Trews—will recognize that he's no dummy.

Below, you can see his reaction to being named the world's fourth leading thinker.

It's rather amusing to note that Brand came out ahead of Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who's fifth on the list. Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner and author who's constantly criticized tight-fisted monetary policy that stifles the economy and harms the poor.

Sixth is Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who's one of her country's foremost critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In an interview with the Georgia Straight last year, Roy explained how corporations are running India and why she expects Modi to send in the army against poverty-stricken villagers mounting an insurgency.

Below, you can hear Roy's views on how students are being bombarded with propaganda in India.

Rounding out the Top 10 are German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, U.K. philosopher John Gray, and U.S. surgeon and writer Atul Gawande.

It's hard to take lists like this seriously when they don't include a single person from Latin America, East Asia, Africa, or the Arab world. But hey, that's not a large part of Prospect's readership.