The civilized world is falling apart in Niall Ferguson’s view. The
world of Ferguson’s concern comprises the United Kingdom and the United States,
which (in sequence) have enjoyed long periods at the top. In The Great
Degeneration, Ferguson signals the decay afflicting our central and
defining institutions. Ferguson mixes nostalgia with alarm: nothing is as it
was. Unlike Acemoglu and Robinson, who give an institutional account of why
poor countries remain poor in Why Nations Fail (reviewed here), Ferguson tells us why great nations decay, why ours is
degenerating.
Although Ferguson distances himself from those who give a purely
cultural account for the rise of British and American prominence, he celebrates
the particular constellation of democracy, capitalism, rule-of-law and
voluntarism found nowhere else. A sequence of accidents may have created our
cheerful and wealthy societies. The reduction in the Great Divergence seems to
concern Ferguson most: the ratio of our well-being to that enjoyed by the rest
of the world (as if a more equitable distribution were a bad thing).If great (though quirky) institutions served us in the past, their present ‘degeneration’ is a cause for concern. Ferguson divides The Great Degeneration into four short essays, each devoted to an institutional category displaying distinctly Anglo-American characteristics. These are democracy, capitalism, rule-of-law and a civil society marked by voluntarism. The book is a write-up of a series of lectures Ferguson presented on the BBC, summarizing and synthesizing his earlier work. Ferguson’s argues that institutions and not culture were the central determinants of the Great Divergence. Yet he also sees the ‘intergenerational partnership,’ the awareness and the willingness to act publicly on behalf of future generations, as foundational. The better democracy we practiced in the past was wiser; perhaps we didn’t think about our neighbor, but we certainly thought about our grandchildren. (Fear not - the last thing Ferguson will address is climate change - he supposedly believes it a hoax.)
