The Great Degeneration Quotes

“simple point is that institutions are to humans what hives are to bees. They are the structures within which we organize ourselves as groups. You know when you are inside one, just as a bee knows when it is in the hive. Institutions have boundaries, often walls. And, crucially, they have rules.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“Americans could once boast proudly that their system set the benchmark for the world; the United States was the rule of law. But now what we see is the rule of lawyers, which is something different.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“Since de Soto published The Mystery of Capital, revolutions in countries like Tunisia and Egypt have provided compelling evidence in support of his approach. He sees the ‘Arab Spring’ primarily as a revolt by frustrated would-be entrepreneurs against corrupt, rent-seeking regimes that preyed on their efforts to accumulate capital. The prime example is the story of the twenty-six-year-old”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 family’s home, which might otherwise have served as collateral for his business. His economic existence depended on the ‘fees’ he paid to officials to allow him to operate his fruit-stand on”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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,”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“well as illiterate, unhealthy and bloody. I admire contemporary social scientific work that distinguishes between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ sets of institutions,18 but as an historian I find that distinction too simplistic. For one of the puzzles of modern history is that successful societies – like eighteenth-century England – often had institutions that today most people would be inclined to condemn. Already by the time of the Victorians, Hanoverian England looked shockingly corrupt in retrospect. And even in the 1850s, to Dickens, England’s rule of law was still an object of derision, not admiration. Moreover, the historical”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 rule of law, the people responsible for the marked deterioration that I detect in our institutions on both sides of the Atlantic? My answers to these questions owe a considerable debt to a now large body of”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 of legal systems; and Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, whose book Why Nations Fail asks similar questions to the ones that interest me.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 fundamentally different political and economic”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 were content to superimpose their extractive ones on top of those they took over from the Aztecs and Incas.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“Essentially, we took two peoples – the Koreans and the Germans – and divided them in two. South Koreans and West Germans got capitalist institutions; North Koreans and East Germans got communist ones. The divergence that occurred in the space of just a few decades was enormous.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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 for all.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“The rationale for the FDA’s rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would have died from side-effects under a less restrictive regime. We count and recount the costs of such side-effects. We do not count the costs of not allowing new drugs to be made available.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“Why exactly has social mobility declined in the United States in the past thirty years, so that the probability has more than halved that a man born into the bottom 25 per cent of the income distribution will end his life in the top quartile?13 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.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“This book is about the causes of our stationary state. It is inspired by Smith’s insight that both stagnation and growth are in large measure the results of ‘laws and institutions’. Its central thesis is that what was true of China in Smith’s day is true of large parts of the Western world in our time. It is our laws and institutions that are the problem. The Great Recession is merely a symptom of a more profound Great Degeneration.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“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, they are the key components of our civilization.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“The sequence is clear: first the Glorious Revolution, then agricultural improvement, then imperial expansion, then industrial revolution.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“После того как все граждане поочередно пройдут через крепкие объятия правителя и он вылепит из них то, что ему необходимо, он простирает свои могучие длани на общество в целом. Он покрывает его сетью мелких, витиеватых, единообразных законов, которые мешают наиболее оригинальным умам и крепким душам вознестись над толпой. Он не сокрушает волю людей, но размягчает ее, сгибает и направляет; он редко побуждает к действию, но постоянно сопротивляется тому, чтобы кто-то действовал по своей инициативе; он ничего не разрушает, но препятствует рождению нового; он не тиранит, но мешает, подавляет, нервирует, гасит, оглупляет и превращает в конце концов весь народ в стадо пугливых и трудолюбивых животных, пастырем которых выступает правительство. — де Токвиль”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“Восточный сад можно разбить в Англии, а английский - на Востоке. Но существуют естественные пределы заимствования.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“Быть настоящим гражданином значит не только голосовать, зарабатывать деньги и воздерживаться от правонарушений. Благодаря включенности в общности более высокого порядка, нежели семья, мы усваиваем, как вырабатывать и соблюдать правила поведения: короче говоря, как нам устраивать собственную жизнь. Учить своих детей. Заботиться о нуждающихся. Бороться с преступностью. Содержать улицы в чистоте.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“Мы ждали летающих машин, а взамен получили 140 символов. — Питер Тиль”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“Завжди існуватимуть жадібні люди. Зрештою вони завжди там, де є (чи мали би бути) гроші. Але жадібні люди шахраюватимуть чи дозволятимуть собі недбало ставитися, лише якщо відчуватимуть, що навряд чи їхній злочин помітять, чи суворо покарають за нього.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“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, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“Consider this: the US economy created 2.4 million jobs in the three years beginning in June 2009. In the same period, 3.3 million Americans were awarded disabled worker benefits. The percentage of working-age Americans collecting disability insurance has risen from below three percent in 1990 to six percent. Unemployment is being concealed – and rendered permanent – in ways all too familiar to Europeans. Able bodied people are classified as disabled and never work again.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration

“If there is one educational policy I would like to see adopted throughout the United Kingdom, it would be a policy that aimed to increase significantly the number of private educational institutions – and, at the same time, to establish programmes of vouchers, bursaries and scholarships to allow a substantial number of children from lower-income families to attend them.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

“Only by historical methods can we explain why, over the past thirty years, so many countries created forms of debt that, by design, cannot be inflated away; and why, as a result, the next generation will be saddled for life with liabilities incurred by their parents and grandparents.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die