It's great to see countries like China and India lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by essentially copying Western ways of doing things.
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Quotes by Niall Ferguson
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Niall Ferguson. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Niall Ferguson
The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.
One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.
We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.
Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages.
Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.
Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.
There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.
My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources.
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness.
The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.
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