|
5be1ccd
|
The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for 'something' to be done after every mishap, the lobbyists ensure that the small print protects the vested interests they serve, and the lawyers profit from the whole sorry mess.5
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
10c0b09
|
Complexity is not cheap; on the contrary, it is very expensive indeed. The administrative state has found an easy solution to the problem of increasing the volume of public 'goods' without making commensurate increases to taxation, and that is to finance current government consumption through borrowing.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1c541ea
|
Intergenerational inequity in public finance, hypertrophic growth of regulation, deterioration in the rule of law and corrosion of educational institutions - taken together, these lead to a 'great degeneration' of both economic performance and (as we shall see) social cohesion.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
68c638c
|
Even if, as seems likely, Islamic State is defeated in Iraq and Syria, its network in cyberspace and in the West will live on, a toxic milieu where the memes of dawa can breed, converting one loser after another to the cause of murderous martyrdom.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
0858a58
|
In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful ones attract it, and it is their notoriety, rather than their achievement, that leads to their over-representation.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
4e210b7
|
Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016. As in Britain, so in the United States, the political establishment took it for granted that the old ways would suffice.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
fc0e910
|
arguing that Google and Facebook should do the censoring is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is evidence of unusual naivety. As if these two companies were not already mighty enough, European politicians apparently want to give them the power to limit their citizens' free expression.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
3a0aaf4
|
You will look in vain for a European search engine, a European online retailer, a European social network. The biggest EU-based Internet company is Spotify, the Stockholm-based music and video streaming company founded in 2006.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
5ee2b78
|
the European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook's 'community standards' may end up being stricter than European law.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
52389c4
|
The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance) 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1ba4a2f
|
As a result of these mistakes, the world now finds itself in the grip of an epidemic of Islamist terror. Of the last sixteen years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries experiencing attacks and close to 33,000 people killed. The second worst was 2015, with over 29,000 deaths. In that year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for three quarters of all deaths from terrorism: Islamic State, Boko Haram, th..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
3331199
|
There is a powerful case to be made that the innovations of the earlier industrial revolutions were of more benefit to mankind than those of the most recent one.11 And if the principal consequence of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence really is going to be large-scale unemployment,12 the chances are surely quite low that a majority of mankind13 will uncomplainingly devote themselves to harmless leisure pursuits in return for some..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
8faeb6f
|
it is no longer a mere possibility that this network can be instrumentalized by corrupt oligarchs or religious fanatics to wage a new and unpredictable kind of war in cyberspace. That war has commenced. Indices of geopolitical risk suggest that conventional and even nuclear war may not be far behind.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
bea7dfa
|
In 1800 seven out of the world's ten biggest cities had still been Asian, and Beijing had still exceeded London in size. By 1900, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution, only one of the biggest was Asian; the rest were European or American.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
ad440ca
|
Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.'51 The threat to world order can be summed up as 'very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x the New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x weapons'.52
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
8459586
|
When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar size, 'the giant connected component resists even after removing more than 80 per cent of the nodes, and the average distance within it [between nodes] is practically the same as at the beginning
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
9e8b85d
|
At around the same time, the coffee house owner Thomas Garraway published a broadsheet entitled 'An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA', in which he claimed that it could cure 'Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Liptitude Distillations, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Griping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind'.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
892a2dd
|
With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
26894dd
|
Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
e1abf11
|
American legislators scarcely rested until Chinese immigration to the United States had been altogether stopped. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese for ten years, introduced 'certificates of registration' for departing workers (effectively re-entry permits), required Chinese officials to vet travellers from Asia, and for the first time in US history created an offence of illegal immigration, with the possibil..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
a071445
|
Just as global networks of communication and transportation had made the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century possible,6 so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to resist them.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
e6df6c6
|
by the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.36
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
97f9a11
|
Aunque Chamberlain seguia negandose a escuchar el consejo de Churchill de vincular a Rusia al tratado anglofrances, Halifax hizo publica una nota de prensa afirmando que, en el caso de un ataque aleman a Checoslovaquia, <>. Lejos de ir en contra de un supuesto pacifismo popular, esto reflejaba exactamente el talante predomin..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
b55d612
|
In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?
|
|
sins
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
1bdff5e
|
Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression "Fuck off".' "
|
|
football
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
48b764e
|
The aim of Cold War competition in the third world was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to "fill(...) a spiritual void," for "even Communism has made many more converts through the theological quality of Marxism than through the materialistic aspect on which it prides itself."
|
|
political-science
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
8e16d39
|
our species should really be known as Homo dictyous ('network man') because - to quote the sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler - 'our brains seem to have been built for social networks'.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
e9adacd
|
Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per labourer in the UK grew over 25 per cent but wages rose barely 5 per cent. The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 per cent in 1801 to 35 per cent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 per cent of the population were classified as 'proprietors and rentiers' (living from their investments) and ..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
6ae9fc7
|
Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
0cfc015
|
La retorica europea de los nazis hallo especial resonancia en todos aquellos conservadores para quienes el dominio aleman parecia un mal menor frente al comunismo sovietico.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
d0bc3c9
|
Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, the very legitimacy of democratic politics is being corroded because 'interest groups . . . are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying', a process that he dubs 'repatrimonialization
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
9da40e7
|
O atual debate entre os proponentes dos livres mercados e aqueles da intervencao estatal e, em essencia, um debate entre escolas de pensamento notadamente ocidentais: os seguidores de Adam Smith e os de John Maynard Keynes, com alguns poucos devotos obstinados de Karl Marx que ainda persistem. Os lugares de nascimento de todos os tres falam por si sos: Kirkcaldy, Cambridge, Treveris. Na pratica, a maior parte do mundo hoje esta integrada a ..
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
a8d2d37
|
Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |
|
7062011
|
No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.
|
|
|
Niall Ferguson |