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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 05d493d | approach reveals a point that is often overlooked. It is certainly desirable that societies with bad institutions should get better ones. We see that process going on today all over the world, in much of Asia, in parts of South America and even in Africa. But there is a more insidious process that is going on at the same time, whereby societies with good institutions gradually get worse ones. Why is this? Who exactly are the enemies of the .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 12976e5 | happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 71397ae | academic literature. Major influences on my thinking include Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on institutions; the pre-eminent economist of modern Africa, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Plundered Planet; Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital; Andrei Shleifer and his numerous co-authors, who have pioneered an economic approach to the comparative study o.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fb6fc4f | The second hallmark of the stationary state was the ability of a corrupt and monopolistic elite to exploit the system of law and administration to their own advantage: In a country too, where, though the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4a6bc3c | For some readers, I dare say, the word 'institution' still conjures up a Victorian vision of lunatic asylums: poor old Niall, he's in an institution now. That is not the kind of institution I mean. I am talking about, for example, political institutions, like the British Parliament or the American Congress. When we talk about | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c64263e | Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, who burned himself to death in front of the governor's offices in the town of Sidi Bouzid in December 2010.12 Bouazizi killed himself precisely one hour after a policewoman, backed by two municipal officers, had seized from him two crates of pears, a crate of bananas, three crates of apples and a second-hand electronic weight scale worth $179. Those scales were his only capital. He did not have legal title to his fam.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 8061349 | Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from 'rags to riches' in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you have just a 5 per cent chance of getting into the top quintile without a college degree. What Charles Murray has called the 'cognitive elite', educated at exclusive private universities, intermarried and congregated in a few | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 71c4e08 | two square yards of public land. Their arbitrary act of expropriation cost Mohamed Bouazizi his livelihood and his life. But his self-immolation sparked a revolution - though how glorious a revolution remains to be seen. It will depend on how far new constitutional arrangements in countries like Tunisia and Egypt achieve the shift from an extractive to an inclusive state, from the arbitrary power of rent-seeking elites to the rule of law fo.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1a7d537 | poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any, but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time by the inferior mandarins, the quantity of stock employed in all the different branches of business transacted within it can never be equal to what the nature and extent of that business might admit. In every different branch, the oppression of the poor must establish the monopoly of the rich, who, b.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d7de50e | In their book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson make a striking comparison between Egypt today and England in the late seventeenth century: The reason that Britain is richer than Egypt is because in 1688 . . . England . . . had a revolution that transformed the politics and thus the economics of the nation. People fought for and won more political rights and used them to expand their economic opportunities. The result was a .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 218a53c | super zip codes', looks increasingly like a new caste, equipped with the wealth and power to override the effects of mean reversion in human reproduction, so that even their dimmer progeny inherit their lifestyle.14 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d82be0a | There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody. | Adlai Stevenson II | ||
| 943feac | trajectory, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.8 In their terms, England was the first country to move to having 'inclusive' or 'pluralistic' rather than 'extractive' political institutions. Note that other West European societies - for instance, Spain - failed to do this. As a result, the outcomes of European colonization in North and South America were radically different. The English exported inclusive institutions; the Spaniards w.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 8c9bc10 | Somehow no really terrible Western ideas like, say, witch-burning or communism ever get mentioned, though they seem just as plausibly the products of Judaeo-Christian culture as the spirit of capitalism. In any case, while culture may instil norms, institutions create incentives. Britons versed in much the same culture behaved very differently depending on whether they emigrated to New England or worked for the East India Company in Bengal... | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5a71b94 | The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled 'democracy'. The second is labelled 'capitalism'. The third is 'the rule of law'. And the fourth is 'civil society'. Together, | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4eb44fd | they are the key components of our civilization. I want to show that inside these political, economic, legal and social black boxes are highly complex sets of interlocking institutions. Like the circuit boards inside your computer or your smartphone, it is these institutions that make the gadget work. And if it stops working, it is probably because of a defect in the institutional wiring. You cannot understand what is wrong just by looking .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 82a1283 | The key point is that not all sets of institutions, when you add up the sum of the parts, are equal. There are good and bad combinations. In some sets of institutions, people can flourish freely as individuals, as families, as communities. That is because the institutions effectively incentivize us to do good things - like, for example, inventing new and more efficient ways of working, or co-operating with our neighbours rather than trying .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 005af04 | there are institutional frameworks that have the opposite effect: incentivizing bad behaviour like killing people who annoy us, or stealing property we covet, or idling away our time. Where bad institutions pertain, people get stuck in vicious circles of ignorance, ill health, poverty and, often, violence. Unfortunately, history suggests that there are more of these suboptimal frameworks than there are optimal frameworks. A really good set .. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 6a77fc0 | All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man from his most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious? They will resent having somebody plan every little detail for them. And in all fairness, who can blame them for that? Have they not lived in the land of the dead and so what can.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 9850b81 | In particular, it lacked the skills to carry out pacification effectively--or as Kissinger politely put it, "the special qualities developed in a decade or more of combat training do not include discriminating political judgment in volatile and complex circumstances." | Niall Ferguson | ||
| f266a51 | democracy', we are in fact referring to a number of different interlocking institutions. People sticking pieces of paper into ballot boxes, yes. Their elected representatives making speeches and voting in a large assembly hall, yes. But those things alone do not automatically give you democracy. Outwardly, the legislators of countries like Russia and Venezuela are elected, but neither qualifies as a true democracy in the eyes of impartial o.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 84f4331 | The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump. | Michael Wolff | ||
| 13b67d7 | parties - that nominate candidates for election. Just as important as the parties are the officials - civil servants, judges or ombudsmen - whose responsibility it is to ensure that the elections are fair. And then it matters hugely how the legislature itself actually operates. A body of elected representatives can be anything from a wholly sovereign entity, as the British Parliament was until European law began to encroach on it, to an imp.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| c7f1797 | vested interests that financed their election campaigns. In August 2011, as Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya was falling apart, a BBC correspondent in Benghazi spotted some remarkable graffiti on a wall. On the left side of the wall there was a classically straightforward revolutionary message: 'The tyrant should fall, he's a monster.' Direct and to the point. But on the right side, the message was anything but simple. It read: 'We want co.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| aa767b8 |
Marx era una persona odiosa. Vividor desalinado y polemista virtulento le gustaba alardear que su espora era, por nacimiento, < |
Niall Ferguson | ||
| f78fc17 | Hemos olvidado profundamente en todas partes que el Pago Monetario no es la unica relacion entre seres humanos... No es el unico nexo del hombre con el hombre' --Thomas Carlyle | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7885544 | political transition lies in the detail of the constitution, not to mention the rules governing the constituent assembly that designs it. How does the legislature stand relative to the executive and the judiciary? Most constitutions spell that out. But how do the organs of civilian government relate to the military, a question of burning importance in Egypt? Nor can one stop there. Modern nation-states have developed a whole range of instit.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 2581aa7 |
En lugar de coaligarse en una masa empobrecida, el proletariado se subdividio entre unas < |
Niall Ferguson | ||
| 7b63f19 | welfare state is not part of democracy as the ancient Athenians conceived of it. In bee terms, the welfare state seems to create an ever increasing number of dependent drones whom the worker-bees have to support. It also employs a great many bees simply to transfer resources from the workers to the drones. And it seeks to finance itself by accumulating claims on future bees, in the form of public debt. In Chapter 1, I will consider this and.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 1a8aa1d | El Japon en el que Hiro-Hito alcanzo la edad adulta era un pais que admiraba a Occidente por su modernidad al tiempo que se hallaba resentido contra el por su arrogancia. Parecia que, para ser tratado como un igual, Japon tendria que adquirir tambien el ultimo de los accesorios occidentales: un imperio. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 62f07fc | The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered and most richly fed. --WILLIAM JAMES1 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| fd096de | Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour. But what exactly is money? Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought? Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice? How did we | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5051845 | These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. 'Capitalist', by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse to be much heard in polite company. How do the institutions of the democratic state and those of the market economy relate to one another? Do corporations play an active part in politics, through lobbyists and campaign contributions? Do govern.. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 640be4c | Known to the Chinese as 'Iron-Headed Old Rat | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 3a6768b | The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history's most successful narco-state: the British Empire. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 27a2104 | Under the Convention of Chuenpi, signed in January 1841 (but then repudiated by the Emperor), Hong Kong became a British possession. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d04bb69 | between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 06577c0 | Let's face up to the question of who we support; let's defend the bastards and reform them later. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 47e4f90 | It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as 'der Weltkrieg', the world war; the British preferred the 'European War' or, later, the 'Great War'. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 571e6d7 | Hitler had no doubt that it was rival empires, not native nationalism, which posed the real challenge to British rule. | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 174e9ab |
En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt habia dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunion de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los < |
Niall Ferguson | ||
| 5288648 | do you think that I believe that you will protect us? I said, yes. He said, I no longer believe that you will protect us. Your actions over recent years have made clear that to you detente is more important than anything else. I do not believe that any American president will risk nuclear war for Berlin; the only thing that is saving us is that the Soviets cannot be sure of this.72 | Niall Ferguson | ||
| 4bc4b11 | Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude; | Niall Ferguson | ||
| d2a8eff | The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few. | Niall Ferguson |