Empires on the Edge of Chaos: The Nasty Fiscal Arithmetic of Imperial Decline - Niall Ferguson
The 2010 John Bonython Lecture
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Professor Niall Ferguson
Running time: 44 mins
The world is changing: there’s the rise of authoritarian China as a super-power; a Keynesian president leading a weakened United States; the reemergence of democratic India as a great power; the continued decline of Japan; and the probability of continued global economic instability ahead. Is the rise and fall of empires cyclical or arrhythmic? Niall Ferguson's address will consider this question with his lecture titled Empires on the Edge of Chaos: The Nasty Fiscal Arithmetic of Imperial DeclineNiall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Ferguson is a regular television, radio and print contributor on both sides of the Atlantic. The author of numerous books including Empire: The Rise and Demise of British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Ferguson is a contributing editor The Financial Times, writes frequently for Newsweek, and was noted by Time magazine in 2004 as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
