Post: #1

Ferguson attempts here to synthesize research from economics, history and political science to offer the case that the West is in serious decline in more ways than what we see in the economy.

He draws upon the work of Acemoglu and Robinson, as well as Robert Putnam to paint a picture where the cornerstones of advanced civilization such as free-markets and strong civil societies are in decay. He criticizes the Dodd-Frank financial regulation as failing to understand what the founder of The Economist, Bagehot understood even in the mid-nineteenth century - that the free-market is very much like the struggle for survival in nature, and bad regulation, such as Dodd-Frank, will merely perpetuate the existence of bad banks when they should instead have gone extinct.

The book is quite short (200 pages or so), and I definitely thought there were some interesting parts, but overall the argument was, I felt, quite weak in many places and not entirely convincing all the way through. He did share one very interesting quote by Alexis de Tocqueville though. This is Tocquvilles imagined future society in which civil society has died:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like stranger to the destiny of all others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only and for himself alone...

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood...

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through whichh the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Tocqueville, Democracy in America, book II, part 4, ch. 6

Now if that doesn't describe modern Western society, I don't know what does.

Overall interesting, sloppily done.

I'll read Putnam and take a look at the Acemoglu & Robinson book, as well.

Post: #2

Ferguson's Ascent of Money was pretty good. Seems like it might be worth checking out.

Post: #3

Thanks for posting this. Looks worth checking out. I'm not a neocon but I'm generally a fan of Niall Ferguson's work.