Book : The Great Degeneration How Institutions Decay And...

-Titulo Original : The Great Degeneration How Institutions Decay And Economies Die

-Fabricante :

Penguin Books

-Descripcion Original:

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, a searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective futureWhat causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions-the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail-are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency-and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform. Review “[Ferguson’s] intellectual virtuosity is refreshing. ’The Great Degeneration’ wont be popular in the Obama White House or other centers of power. Jeremiah wasnt popular with the elders of Judea either. They tossed him in jail for his sedition. They had reason later to be sorry.”-The Wall Street JournalBrilliantly written, full of wit and virtuosity, stuffed with memorable lines and gorgeous bits of information. A great read.-The Times (London) (on Civilization)A dazzling history of Western ideas ... epic..-The EconomistThis is sharp. It feels urgent. Ferguson... twists his knife with great literary brio.-Andrew Marr (on Civilization)A masterpiece ... fascinating facts burst like fireworks on every page.-Sunday TimesBrings history alive for the reader with a dazzling knowledge ... peerless.-Independent on Sunday About the Author Niall Ferguson is one of the worlds most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Almost a quarter of a century ago, in the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama could boldly predict ‘an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism . . . the Triumph of the West’ and proclaim that ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ was ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.1 How different the world looks now. ‘Economic liberalism’ is a tarnished brand, while the proponents of ‘state capitalism’ in China and elsewhere openly deride Western democracy. The West is stagnating, and not only in economic terms. In 2013 the World Bank expected the European economy to contract and the US to grow by just 1.6 per cent. China would grow four times faster than that, India two and a half times faster. By 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund, the gross domestic product of China would approach that of the United States.* Those who invested in the West in 1989 have been punished (they have made nothing since 2000), while those who invested in the Rest have been richly rewarded. This ‘great reconvergence’ is a far more astonishing historical event than the collapse of communism that Fukuyama so astutely anticipated. At the time he wrote, the world’s centre of economic gravity was still firmly in the North Atlantic. Today it is beyond the Urals, and by 2025 it will be just north of Kazakhstan - on roughly the same line of latitude as it was i