Contact
Privacy
Book: The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die
Quotes of Book: The Great Degeneration: How
TOP TAGS :ghostsmallnessinsultinghero-wantagebrillianthillsschoolmac

  1. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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.
    book-quote

  2. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 governments play an active part in economic life, through subsidies, tariffs and other market-distorting devices, or through regulation? What is the right balance to be struck
    book-quote

  3. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 other distributional aspects of democracy. In particular, I will ask if we are witnessing a fundamental breakdown in what Edmund Burke called the partnership between the generations.
    book-quote

  4. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 institutions that were undreamed of as recently as a hundred years ago, dedicated to regulating economic and social life and redistributing income. The
    book-quote

  5. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 constitutional rule and for the president to have less authority and the four-year presidential term should not be extended.'17 As that {quite correctly} suggests, the devil in any
    book-quote

  6. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 impotent rubber stamp, like the old Supreme Soviet. Its members can stoutly uphold the interests of their constituents {including those who voted against them}, or they can be in hock to the
    book-quote

  7. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 observers, not to mention those of local opposition leaders. Just as important as the act of putting crossed or stamped papers in ballot boxes are the institutions – usually
    book-quote

  8. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 of institutions is hard to achieve. Bad institutions, by contrast, are easy to get stuck in. And this is why most countries have been poor for most of history, as
    book-quote

  9. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 to murder them. Conversely,
    book-quote

  10. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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 at the shiny casing. You need to look inside.
    book-quote

  11. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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,
    book-quote

  12. Niall Ferguson _ The Great Degeneration: How

    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. In the former case we find inclusive institutions, in the latter extractive ones.
    book-quote
Categories