Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian from Scotland. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His specialities are international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. Ferguson's books include Empire: How...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth18 April 1964
The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.
Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful.
It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all.
Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.
I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.
Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.
Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.