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The Great Degeneration

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The Great Degeneration

By: Niall Ferguson
Narrated by: Paul Slack
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About this listen

Symptoms of decline are all around us today, it seems: slowing growth, crushing debts, aging populations, anti-social behaviour. But what exactly is amiss with Western civilization? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues, is that our institutions - the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail - are degenerating. To arrest the degeneration of the West's civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

The Great Degeneration is the latest, provocative work from Niall Ferguson, best-selling author of The Ascent of Money.

©2012 Niall Ferguson (P)2013 W F Howes Ltd Economics Taxation Capitalism Socialism Economic Inequality Banking Economic disparity

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Critic reviews

"Brilliantly written, full of wit and virtuosity, stuffed with memorable lines and gorgeous bits of information. A great read" ( The Times)
"Brings history alive for the reader with a dazzling knowledge... peerless" ( Independent on Sunday)
All stars
Most relevant
good listen and an interesting critique of modern institutions - to an extent it is a thorough PEST style analysis but has some interesting insights. Very libertarian and pro free market, which I mostly agree with, but this occasionally seems like a Ron Paul type libertarianism - though arguments are well reasoned and compelling

Worth a listen

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I bought this following on from (the brilliant) Ascent of Money, and was a bit disappointed. It is so brief that I felt useful details had been left out, and yet I also felt it was quite hard to follow as an audiobook. Ferguson follows the 'institutional' paradigm of successful societies, and refers repeatedly to 'Why Nations Fail' by Acemoglu and Robinson. In a sense this book is an appendix to theirs (explaining why our societies are poised for failure) and I'd recommend the first one, if you haven't read/audioed it, and then try applying their criteria for success to your own society.

Maybe the worst thing was the tone of the narration. Paul Slack reads in a 'Jeremy Clarkson sarcasm' voice throughout, which made me feel that the degeneration of the legal system and collapse of civil society was my own, personal, fault.

Buy the hard copy

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I regret spending the money on this, as it was a waste. All the content here is the same as Ferguson’s Reith lectures ‘The Rule of Law and its enemies’, which you can listen to for free on the BBC website.

Do not Buy!!

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I had high hopes for this book after enjoying some of Niall Ferguson's other material. But this book was a profound disappointment.

The premise is not a bad one - that there are deep structural issues with Western institutions. So far, so good. And some of the exploration of why institutions fail - overbearing government intervention, or overly restrictive legislation, are spot on.

But rapidly, this book turns into a rallying call for unregulated capitalism. The endless stream of non-sequiturs, and conflating correlation with causation, is utterly baffling. For example, when a poorly regulated financial system caused untold misery to millions in 2008, what was the problem, according to Ferguson? That the regulation existed at all - with less regulation, we would all have been better off. Apparently. Eh?

A whole chapter is dedicated to why Western culture is so vastly superior to everywhere else - the chapter on law is vomit-inducing. The premise is 'what can everywhere else (e.g. China) learn from our legal systems?', which is immediately a dodgy start, when the idea of transplanting one legal system from one place to another is laughable, as if it's something the Chinese would come to and ask for. But it gets worse, with paragraph after paragraph implicitly stating that everything in the West is automatically the best.

The chapter on education is phenomenally elitist. Apparently the answer to poor public schooling is not to invest in better infrastructure, pay teachers properly or to try and raise standards - it is to create a market. This market would work fine for Ferguson and those who share his beliefs, as wealthy and privileged elites, but for the rest of us 90%, it makes no sense whatsoever. Free schools in the UK have been a disaster - for every success, there are a dozen that have stagnated and several which have got worse.

Perhaps the institution in which Ferguson's degeneration has been greatest is his own - where historians become advocates of elitist, patronising and culturally 'superior' interests on behalf of the wealthy.

Do not read.

Misses the mark entirely - a book that has been disproved in less than a decade

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