Forbes released its ‘World’s Most Powerful People List’ last week. The only striking aspect of this year’s roll call is its predictability. Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao and Angela Merkel head the list. The King of Saudi Arabia, the Pope, Ben Bernanke - the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve - and David Cameron are included in the top ten.

Let’s recap how the elites have fared this last year. In solving America’s unemployment and deficit troubles, Obama and Bernanke have been hamstrung by a belligerent House of Representatives, an angry Tea Party and their own lack of preparation. Across the pond, European leaders have been muddling about for months while market confidence diminishes and populations scatter in search of work. The G-20 Cannes summit last week was only the latest debacle of world leaders failing to act when action is required.

Is there any doubt what has to be done? America must spend on jobs and Europe has to get the cash together to bail out Greece or the dominoes begin to fall. The problem is that while money, information and technology move at increasing speeds, the aged institutions and their leaders haven’t another gear to shift to.

So why do the powerful continue to prod while the world whips by them at an accelerating pace? Part of the problem lies in the way they still think about power. Forbes’ list is an example; heads of states top the list while the average age of the twenty most powerful people is 62.45 years. David Cameron is a spritely lad in comparison, at 45 he is the second youngest.

What this conception of power does not seem to understand is the heads are attached at the neck to aged institutions that can routinely stop them from achieving their goals. At the same time they are surrounded by a sea of information that can gather force to batter banks, expose governments and topple dictatorships at unexpected times and alarming speeds. If we want to understand why the old guard seems out of date we need to understand this shift.

We are a generation that demands to know and do everything immediately and we increasingly have the capacity to accomplish this with free information at our fingertips. Naturally those who are at the top of the power grid will be the people who have learned to cater for and exploit this.

We should therefore include Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Robin Li, Tom Cook, Julian Assange, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg as serious power brokers. The heads of Google, Amazon, Baidu, Apple, WikiLeaks, Twitter and Facebook respectively control large chunks of the world’s flow of information. They have reinvented the way we read, publish, communicate, network, socialize, gather information and self-express.

The political effects are real. Occupy Wall Street, which is shifting the American political discussion in an election year, the Arab Spring, which changed Arab politics irrevocably, and the Tea Party, which has gathered the youngest contingent of House Members together in a conservative revolution, have all used the new generation of technology to intimidate and over-power established elites.

As for the governments and banks of the world they have not slowed down so much as been overtaken by accelerated times. Government dithering is an age-old pastime. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 to document the new republic he found a nation of 13 million governed federally by 48 senators, 213 house representatives and one president. Today the United States has a population of 313 million run by 100 senators, 435 representatives and still only one president. Is there any wonder why Obama has gone grey? Or why Americans feel their government is out of touch? The same figures and feelings are reflected throughout the Western world. The institutions we created to govern us are now centuries old, they are now feeling the pressure of increased populations and increased bureaucracy. How much longer til the bubble bursts?

However, these institutions are durable and have proven flexible in the past. Change is not unprecedented, only the speed of change. So what can be done? One likely possibility is decentralization and devolution of powers. It’s already happening in a number of countries and seems to answer the demands and sense of isolation many citizens are voicing.

The prodding of the powerful might in the end be enough to get us through this round of crises, but we cannot put off reform for long. Government will have to learn to innovate with the rest of us. Here’s a suggestion: maybe the first step can be to give their aides smartphones instead of BlackBerrys, (they are so last year!)