Civilisation goes west, leaving empire on the edge of ruin
July 26, 2010
http://vimeo.com/14015265
When the emails started going out that Niall Ferguson was coming to Australia to deliver a big address in Sydney on Wednesday, tickets to the dinner sold out quickly. Many more people want to attend than could be accommodated.
Ferguson is not just a superstar within the international intellectual elite; the theme of his speech is sweeping in its scale and implications - ''Empires on the edge of ruin''. He will not be just talking about the past, but also the present.
He even evokes the word ''epoch''. As a professor of history at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, Ferguson has scanned the economic data over hundreds of years and come to this conclusion: ''I think it is reasonable to assume that we are living through the end of an epoch . . . Something that is really the end of 500 years of history . . . The great question is whether I'm right in believing that we're living through the end of the pre-eminence of the West . . . and the end of Western civilisation as we know it. This is a huge secular shift.''
Conservative economics historian Niall Ferguson has criticised the federal government's stimulus policy.
The global financial crisis and recession had exposed and accelerated this shift, he told a private conference at Coolum in Queensland on Saturday (having arrived from London the day before). ''We are watching the disintegration of Europe,'' he said. Observing this process is like watching ''a fascinating real-time train wreck''.
The sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the US and Japan is, he says, ''far from over. The situation is dire''. But not in Australia. Instead, he posits a different challenge for this country: ''We are shifting into an era of Asian dominance . . . Australia is effectively part of the Chinese economy . . . Do you want to be a colony of the Chinese empire?''
I can thank a debt of love for the fact that I was able to meet, interview and listen to Ferguson at the weekend.
Tomorrow, Ferguson will pick up another laurel, an honorary doctorate from Macquarie University. He can add that to the double professorships at Harvard, which poached him from Oxford University, where he was a star. He has also written seven books, several of them bestsellers, and is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute and a contributing editor for the Financial Times. He will soon extend his franchise to television, writing and fronting a documentary series to be broadcast next year. He is only 46.
The TV series will be about the ascent of European economic power. An obvious sequel could be about the descent of European power. Ferguson describes Europe's and America's debt position as ''fundamentally unsustainable''.
In the long march of history, a return to primacy by China would be logical. ''In 1420,'' he says, ''you could not have predicted the ascent of the West. London was one-tenth the size of Beijing . . . Europe was a collection of warring little kingdoms.''
Not everyone is enamoured with Ferguson. For some time he has engaged in a celebrated debate with the most recent Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for The New York Times. At the weekend Ferguson described their skirmishing as ''a sometimes ill-tempered debate''.
Krugman is an advocate of classic Keynesian stimulus by big government to ride out the downturn. But Ferguson believes we have passed the point where deeply indebted governments can rely on yet more stimulus. He wants a gradual deflating of the debt balloon and more expansive monetary policy. He worries more about deflation than inflation.
While Krugman is an economist, Ferguson is an economic historian. It is a significant difference. ''Financial history can illuminate our experiences better than any economic model,'' he says.
His point is helped by the failure of most economics prognosticators to anticipate the near-meltdown of the global financial markets in 2008 and the near-depression this caused.
Having come to Australia, Fergusion is taking pleasure at being in an English-speaking country where the economy is sound and the mood is optimistic.
''You have a fantastic opportunity to do things that other Anglo-Saxon countries can only dream of. You should be setting up a sovereign wealth fund like Norway,'' he says. This would serve as a buffer to the inevitable downturn in the global commodities market and any stumbles by China. ''You had the golden opportunity, but it was frittered away in a pseudo-Keynesian spending binge.''
So much for Kevin Rudd's and Julia Gillard's claim to have saved Australia from the global economic crisis. The world's most famous economic historian has just given them an F.
July 26, 2010
http://vimeo.com/14015265
When the emails started going out that Niall Ferguson was coming to Australia to deliver a big address in Sydney on Wednesday, tickets to the dinner sold out quickly. Many more people want to attend than could be accommodated.
Ferguson is not just a superstar within the international intellectual elite; the theme of his speech is sweeping in its scale and implications - ''Empires on the edge of ruin''. He will not be just talking about the past, but also the present.
He even evokes the word ''epoch''. As a professor of history at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, Ferguson has scanned the economic data over hundreds of years and come to this conclusion: ''I think it is reasonable to assume that we are living through the end of an epoch . . . Something that is really the end of 500 years of history . . . The great question is whether I'm right in believing that we're living through the end of the pre-eminence of the West . . . and the end of Western civilisation as we know it. This is a huge secular shift.''
Conservative economics historian Niall Ferguson has criticised the federal government's stimulus policy.
The global financial crisis and recession had exposed and accelerated this shift, he told a private conference at Coolum in Queensland on Saturday (having arrived from London the day before). ''We are watching the disintegration of Europe,'' he said. Observing this process is like watching ''a fascinating real-time train wreck''.
The sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the US and Japan is, he says, ''far from over. The situation is dire''. But not in Australia. Instead, he posits a different challenge for this country: ''We are shifting into an era of Asian dominance . . . Australia is effectively part of the Chinese economy . . . Do you want to be a colony of the Chinese empire?''
I can thank a debt of love for the fact that I was able to meet, interview and listen to Ferguson at the weekend.
Tomorrow, Ferguson will pick up another laurel, an honorary doctorate from Macquarie University. He can add that to the double professorships at Harvard, which poached him from Oxford University, where he was a star. He has also written seven books, several of them bestsellers, and is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute and a contributing editor for the Financial Times. He will soon extend his franchise to television, writing and fronting a documentary series to be broadcast next year. He is only 46.
The TV series will be about the ascent of European economic power. An obvious sequel could be about the descent of European power. Ferguson describes Europe's and America's debt position as ''fundamentally unsustainable''.
In the long march of history, a return to primacy by China would be logical. ''In 1420,'' he says, ''you could not have predicted the ascent of the West. London was one-tenth the size of Beijing . . . Europe was a collection of warring little kingdoms.''
Not everyone is enamoured with Ferguson. For some time he has engaged in a celebrated debate with the most recent Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for The New York Times. At the weekend Ferguson described their skirmishing as ''a sometimes ill-tempered debate''.
Krugman is an advocate of classic Keynesian stimulus by big government to ride out the downturn. But Ferguson believes we have passed the point where deeply indebted governments can rely on yet more stimulus. He wants a gradual deflating of the debt balloon and more expansive monetary policy. He worries more about deflation than inflation.
While Krugman is an economist, Ferguson is an economic historian. It is a significant difference. ''Financial history can illuminate our experiences better than any economic model,'' he says.
His point is helped by the failure of most economics prognosticators to anticipate the near-meltdown of the global financial markets in 2008 and the near-depression this caused.
Having come to Australia, Fergusion is taking pleasure at being in an English-speaking country where the economy is sound and the mood is optimistic.
''You have a fantastic opportunity to do things that other Anglo-Saxon countries can only dream of. You should be setting up a sovereign wealth fund like Norway,'' he says. This would serve as a buffer to the inevitable downturn in the global commodities market and any stumbles by China. ''You had the golden opportunity, but it was frittered away in a pseudo-Keynesian spending binge.''
So much for Kevin Rudd's and Julia Gillard's claim to have saved Australia from the global economic crisis. The world's most famous economic historian has just given them an F.
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