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
There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom.
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.
Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story.
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.
I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education.
I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement.
I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England.
If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing.
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.
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.
What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.
The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.