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I recall watching Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money back in 2009. Recently while YouTube surfing I ran across Ferguson again, and I have spend a number of delightful hours listening to his presentations, interviews, and debates.
I am thinking Ferguson is today's best, most original, most perceptive thinker, speaker, writer regarding economics, economic history, and the implication of economics on the political process.
I agree that by now the so-called six "killer apps" are shareable.
You know, ten thousand years or so ago some people invented agriculture, over the next 9,800 years or so it spread throughout much of the world and by now no one remembers exactly who invented it, except maybe a few scholars (and even they will disagree).
It is only about 500 years since some people invented firearms and global navigation and 200 since industrialization, in about 500-1000 years from now no one will remember exactly who invented them, except maybe a few scholars (and even they will disagree).
You remember the commercial about a football coach pounding the blackboard at halftime and berating his team because of their mistakes, then one of the players asks, "Coach, aren't we ahead by 21 points?"
And the coach replies, "You see, that's what I'm talking about: the minute you're satisfied with yourself as a football player, that's when we're finished as a team."
Niall Ferguson? The man who tried to debunk counter-cyclical policies since Keynes was "homo who had no children". While that is certainly original, it has no merit, not to mention extremely juvenile.
This is the same man who has been warning about out of control inflation and high interest rates for years. Not to mention he still champions R&R work which has been thoroughly debunked, while showing that causal link between large debt/gdp and economic performance runs in the opposite direction than what he claims.
After being wrong for so many years, even on basic economics, one would expect Ferguson to learn and grow from his follies, but he does not. Instead, he continues to make a fool out of himself, talking about field that he knows so little about.
Niall Ferguson is the most pompous blithering idiot who passes himself off as an economist when he's really just a historian that apologizes for capital every chance he gets.
Agree with him or no, the one thing you can say for Krugman here is that he actually IS an economist.
Exactly, and a pretty well respected one too. Niall is a historian with too much clout because of his rather extreme pro-establishment line. I remember him being on a discussion panel with Jeff Sachs of Columbia University. Sachs is a pretty prominent developmental economist and while I disagree with his past reform recommendations in Russia nonetheless he has come 180 on neo-liberalism. But Niall was just a pompous jerk on the panel berating Sachs for not seeing the wonderful side of neo-liberal corporate capitalism.
The man is ludicrous.
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