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0e1e54e
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however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in a..
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Niall Ferguson |
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568e6c2
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rigid structures of a hierarchical order can disintegrate with astounding rapidity.
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Niall Ferguson |
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b7943d6
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networks tend to be more creative than hierarchies
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Niall Ferguson |
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aa9e292
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billions of things linked to one another in myriad ways
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Niall Ferguson |
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98353ef
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American society was justly famed in the nineteenth century for the richness of its associational life. Indeed, as we have seen, Alexis de Tocqueville had seen this as one of the foundations of the country's success as a democracy. Yet the very ease with which social networks could form in the United States created a vulnerability that was ruthlessly exploited by a foreign network imported into the country during the great influx of migrant..
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Niall Ferguson |
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5cb9b2e
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six degrees of Monica Lewinsky,
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Niall Ferguson |
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8f13776
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It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.
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Niall Ferguson |
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4cce3e5
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more likely to have creative ideas (or less likely to suffer from group-think).
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Niall Ferguson |
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baeb00e
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the first symptoms of decline. "The collapse of nations," he argued, was due to "internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . . What would have been Western history if the knights who defeated the Arabs at Tours had surrendered because they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of Christianity? Central Europe would today be Moslem."134"
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Niall Ferguson |
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002b873
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My generation feels like it's the lucky one,' she told me one night. 'Our grandparents had the Great Leap Forward, our parents had the Cultural Revolution. But we get to study, to travel, to make money. So I guess we really don't think that much about the Square thing.
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Niall Ferguson |
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79648a9
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on Facebook 'the user is the product
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Niall Ferguson |
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ff5ced2
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hierarchies are just special kinds of network in which flows of information or resources are restricted to certain edges in order to maximize the centrality of the ruling node.
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Niall Ferguson |
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6b41683
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The Portuguese did not arrive with many products of their own to offer Asian consumers (though they did bring some slaves and gold from their West African outposts). That was not the point. Nor did they come as conquerors, intent on acquiring territory or new subjects for their king. What the Portuguese had was a series of technological advantages that made their bid to establish a new and superior trade network viable.
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Niall Ferguson |
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311ef6b
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Portuguese craftsmen such as Agostinho de Goes Raposo, Francisco Gois and Joao Dias perfected the construction of nautical instruments. The Portuguese caravel - and its successors the great nau (1480) and the galleon (1510) - were also significantly better than other sailing ships of the time. Finally, with the Cantino Map of 1502, the Portuguese achieved a breakthrough in cartography: the first modern projection of the world's geography, w..
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Niall Ferguson |
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01aabcb
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Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?
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Niall Ferguson |
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63818ea
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technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures - but that the consequences of that change will be determined by the structures, emergent properties and interactions of these networks.
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Niall Ferguson |
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fff1869
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Considerations on Representative Government (1861) - that they enjoy the benefits of her uniquely advanced culture: first, a better government: more complete security of property; moderate taxes; a more permanent ... tenure of land. Secondly, improvement of the public intelligence; the decay of usages or superstitions which interfere with the effective implementation of industry; and the growth of mental activity, making the people alive to..
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Niall Ferguson |
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6af1b12
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Communism was a distinct possibility until the coup of 1989'.2 Yet it was obvious to any attentive visitor to the Soviet Union that something was amiss with the planned economy. Consumer goods were of dismal quality and in chronically short supply. In antiquated factories, pilfering, alcohol abuse and absenteeism were rife. It is hard to believe that any amount of computing power would have saved such a fundamentally flawed system. For the ..
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Niall Ferguson |
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ed1012f
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Como senalaba Hayek: <>.
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Niall Ferguson |
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aea3b71
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The leaders of continental Europe would indeed plough relentlessly ahead with monetary union, so that by the beginning of 1999 the euro - a single European currency managed by an authentically federal European Central Bank - was a reality. In doing so, they revealed their indestructible faith in the power of hierarchical structures even in an age of exponential network growth.
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Niall Ferguson |
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e861da9
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valley of the clueless
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Niall Ferguson |
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9657f0e
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Trump campaign's involvement with the alt-right brought anti-Semitism back
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Niall Ferguson |
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731eab4
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Facebook relayed the bogus story that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope.
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Niall Ferguson |
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7556fca
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In a pre-Internet campaign, certainly, he would have struggled to match Clinton,
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Niall Ferguson |
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b6135b7
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unintelligible because the print was so small.
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Niall Ferguson |
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99def91
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Actions that help build trusted networks serve your cause
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Niall Ferguson |
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575055c
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Giving the world's poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water
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Niall Ferguson |
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34ca01b
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there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them
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Niall Ferguson |
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e373274
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if Moore's Law continues to hold, computers should be able to simulate the human brain by around 2030
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Niall Ferguson |
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067adf8
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In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.36 This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research. If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline.
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Niall Ferguson |
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cec04e7
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the dichotomy between network and hierarchy is an ancient idea.
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Niall Ferguson |
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392672a
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Sin embargo, todos estos recursos del Estado administrativo imponen sobre el sector privado unas cargas que acaban por reducir la tasa de crecimiento y la creacion de empleo.[10] La desigualdad intergeneracional en las finanzas publicas, el crecimiento hipertrofico de la regulacion, el deterioro del imperio de la ley y la erosion de las instituciones educativas; todo ello, en conjunto, llevo a la <> del desempeno economic..
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Niall Ferguson |
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a9c26dd
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The problem is that the ISIS network defies conventional counter-terrorist tactics. Contrary to popular belief, this is not because its relies on 'lone wolves', who by their very nature are hard to detect. The Paris attacks of November 2015 were a well-planned operation involving around eighteen people in addition to the nine attackers.
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Niall Ferguson |
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e56dba5
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When we speak of 'populism' today,1 we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street - or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on their sofa, their attention skipping fitfully from flat-screen TV to laptop to smartphone to tablet and back to television, or the man and woman at work, sitting in front of desktop PCs but mostly exchanging suggestive personal messages on their ..
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Niall Ferguson |
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23d05be
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though this was not formally demonstrated until the 2010 mid-term elections to Congress - Facebook was a highly effective tool for political mobilization, especially when used to target local non-digital networks.
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Niall Ferguson |
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14dc9ba
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A generation mostly removed from conflict - the baby-boomers - had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflations and other forms of expropriation.
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Niall Ferguson |
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8866e17
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Some of the network graphs that Able Danger produced were twenty feet long and almost wholly unintelligible because the print was so small.8 Krebs himself concluded that there would be no substitute for human intelligence in the war on terrorism; the alternative would be to drown in big data.
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Niall Ferguson |
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3242975
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The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,
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Niall Ferguson |
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5827db8
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The essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural. The essence of bureaucracy is its quest for safety; its success is calculability . . . The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.
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Niall Ferguson |
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1b1b21e
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propinquity to power is perceived to matter, especially in a time of crisis.
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Niall Ferguson |
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9f03cd0
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To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation, though it was greatly facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian liberals.1 Lenin's goose should have been cooked after the failure of the first Bolshevik coup attempt in early July and his exposure as a German agent in the newspaper Zhivoe Slovo, which led to formal charges of treason against him and ten other Bolshevik leaders.
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Niall Ferguson |
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0d97bbe
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Stalin's power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication - with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub - and total control of a secret police staffed by men who themselves lived in fear.
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Niall Ferguson |
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6ea87f7
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government had degenerated into what has been called an 'administrative' or 'managerial' state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated regulation that had precisely the opposite effect of that intended.
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Niall Ferguson |
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8908b8b
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a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century histories
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Niall Ferguson |