Niall Ferguson

Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964 to James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Archibald Hamilton, a physics teacher. Ferguson grew up in the Ibrox area of Glasgow in a home close to the Ibrox Park football stadium. He attended The Glasgow Academy. He was brought up as an atheist, although he has encouraged his children to study religion and attends church occasionally. In a 2023 interview with Jordan Peterson, Ferguson declared: "I'm a lapsed atheist ... I go to church every Sunday, precisely because having been brought up as an atheist, I came to realise in my career as a historian that not only is atheism a disastrous basis for a society ... but also because I don't think it can be a basis for individual ethical decision making." Ferguson cites his father as instilling in him a strong sense of self-discipline and of the moral value of work, while his mother encouraged his creative side. His maternal grandfather, a journalist, encouraged him to write. and his admiration of historian A. J. P. Taylor, with Max Hastings quoting Ferguson as saying that he "wanted to be the AJP Taylor de nos jours". Oxford Ferguson received a demyship (highest scholarship) from Magdalen College, Oxford. He had become a Thatcherite by 1982. In 1985, he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history and was awarded an MA from Oxford. Ferguson studied as a Hanseatic Scholar at the University of Hamburg from 1986 until 1988. He received his DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 1989. His dissertation was titled "Business and Politics in the German Inflation: Hamburg 1914–1924". ==Career==

Academic career In 1989, Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. From 1990 to 1992 he was an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history. In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and in 2004 he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics. In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005. In 2021 he joined Bari Weiss, the Shakespeare scholar Pano Kanelos and the entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale to found the University of Austin. At the time, Ferguson said he was starting the college because "higher ed is broken". In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London. In 2018 at Stanford, emails were released to the public and university administrators which documented Ferguson's attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson's choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative. Ferguson responded in his column saying, "Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. 'A famous victory', I wrote the morning after the Murray event. 'Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.' Then I added: 'Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile'—a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on 'Mr O'. The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down." Business In 2000, Ferguson was a founding director of Boxmind, an Oxford-based educational technology company. In 2006, he set up Chimerica Media Ltd., a London-based television production company. In 2007, Ferguson was appointed as an investment management consultant by GLG Partners, to advise on geopolitical risk as well as current structural issues in economic behaviour relating to investment decisions. GLG is a UK-based hedge fund management firm headed by Noam Gottesman. Politics and Society Ferguson was an advisor to the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign and supported the Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign. Ferguson serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the World.Minds Foundation. Commentary, documentaries and broadcasting , London, 2023 Ferguson has written regularly for British newspapers and magazines since the mid-1980s. At that time, he was lead writer for The Daily Telegraph and a regular book reviewer for The Daily Mail. In the summer of 1989, while travelling in Berlin, he wrote an article for a British newspaper with the provisional headline "The Berlin Wall is Crumbling", but it was not published. In the early 2000s he wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph and Los Angeles Times, leaving in 2007 to become a contributing editor to the Financial Times. Between 2008 and 2012, he wrote regularly for Newsweek. won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary. In 2011, his film company Chimerica Media released its first feature-length documentary, Kissinger, which won the New York Film Festival's prize for Best Documentary. In an interview with Peter Robinson, Ferguson recounted the "humiliation" his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, endured at being disinvited from giving the commencement address at Brandeis University in 2014. Observing this to being a recurring phenomena as "a curious illiberal turn" for universities, including Harvard where he was teaching, and that this made him a critic of cancel culture. Prospect has since described him as one of the most prominent supporters of anti cancel-culture. Television documentaries • Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) • American Colossus (2004) • The War of the World (2006) • The Ascent of Money (2008) • Civilization: Is the West History? (2011) • Kissinger (2011) • China: Triumph and Turmoil (2012) • The Pity of War (2014) • Networld (2020) BBC Reith Lectures at Gresham College. In May 2012, the BBC announced Niall Ferguson was to present its annual Reith Lectures. These four lectures, titled The Rule of Law and its Enemies, examine the role man-made institutions have played in the economic and political spheres. In the first lecture, held at the London School of Economics, titled The Human Hive, Ferguson argues for greater openness from governments, saying they should publish accounts which clearly state all assets and liabilities. He said that governments should also follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and above all generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the inter-generational implications of current fiscal policy. In the lecture, Ferguson says young voters should be more supportive of government austerity measures if they do not wish to pay further down the line for the profligacy of the baby boomer generation. In the second lecture, The Darwinian Economy, Ferguson reflects on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and allegedly erroneous conclusions that many people have drawn from it about the role of regulation, and asks whether regulation is in fact "the disease of which it purports to be the cure". The Landscape of Law was the third lecture, delivered at Gresham College. It examines the rule of law in comparative terms, asking how far the common law's claims to superiority over other systems are credible, and whether we are living through a time of "creeping legal degeneration" in the English-speaking world. The fourth and final lecture, Civil and Uncivil Societies, focuses on institutions (outside the political, economic and legal realms) designed to preserve and transmit particular knowledge and values. Ferguson asks whether the modern state is quietly killing civil society in the Western world, and what non-Western societies can do to build a vibrant civil society. The first lecture was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service on Tuesday, 19 June 2012. The series is available as a BBC podcast. Books The Cash Nexus In his 2001 book, The Cash Nexus, which he wrote following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, Bernard Porter, famous for expressing his views during the Porter–MacKenzie debate on the British Empire, attacked Empire in The London Review of Books as a "panegyric to British colonialism". In response to this, Ferguson drew Porter's attention to the conclusion of the book, where he writes: "No one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples." Despite this, Ferguson argues that the British Empire was still preferable to German and Japanese rule at the time: The 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century too the empire more than justified its own existence. For the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly—and they admitted it themselves—far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them. The United States is an empire in denial, not acknowledging the scale of global responsibilities. The American writer Michael Lind, responding to Ferguson's advocation of an enlarged American military through conscription, accused Ferguson of engaging in apocalyptic alarmism about the possibility of a world without the United States as the dominant power and of a casual disregard for the value of human life. War of the World In War of the World, published in 2006, Ferguson argued that a combination of economic volatility, decaying empires, psychopathic dictators, racially/ethnically motivated and institutionalised violence resulted in the wars and genocides of what he calls "History's Age of Hatred". The New York Times Book Review named War of the World one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006, while the International Herald Tribune called it "one of the most intriguing attempts by an historian to explain man's inhumanity to man". Ferguson addresses the paradox that, though the 20th century was "so bloody", it was also "a time of unparalleled [economic] progress". As with his earlier work Empire, War of the World was accompanied by a Channel 4 television series presented by Ferguson. The Ascent of Money Published in 2008, The Ascent of Money examines the history of money, credit, and banking. In it, Ferguson predicts a financial crisis as a result of the world economy and in particular the United States using too much credit. He cites the China–United States dynamic which he refers to as Chimerica where an Asian "savings glut" helped create the subprime mortgage crisis with an influx of easy money. Civilization Published in 2011, Civilization: The West and the Rest examines what Ferguson calls the most "interesting question" of our day: "Why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?". In the review of Ferguson's book, The Economist wrote: In 1500 Europe's future imperial powers controlled 10% of the world's territories and generated just over 40% of its wealth. By 1913, at the height of empire, the West controlled almost 60% of the territories, which together generated almost 80% of the wealth. This stunning fact is lost, he regrets, on a generation that has supplanted history's sweep with a feeble-minded relativism that holds "all civilisations as somehow equal". Ferguson attributes this divergence to the West's development of six "killer apps", which he finds were largely missing elsewhere in the world in 1500 – "competition, the scientific method, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism and the Protestant work ethic". Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist Kissinger The Idealist, Volume I, published in September 2015, is the first part of a planned two-part biography of Henry Kissinger based on his private papers. The book starts with a quote from a letter which Kissinger wrote in 1972. The book examines Kissinger's life from being a refugee and fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938, to serving in the United States Army as a "free man" in World War II, to studying at Harvard. The book explores the history of Kissinger joining the Kennedy administration and later becoming critical of its foreign policy, to supporting Nelson Rockefeller on three failed presidential bids, to joining the Nixon administration. The book includes Kissinger's early evaluation of the Vietnam War and his efforts to negotiate with the North Vietnamese in Paris (Paris Peace Accords). Historians and political scientists gave the book mixed reviews. In a review about The Idealist, The Economist wrote: "Mr Ferguson, a British historian also at Harvard, has in the past sometimes produced work that is rushed and uneven. Not here. Like Mr Kissinger or loathe him, this is a work of engrossing scholarship." In a negative review of The Idealist, the American journalist Michael O'Donnell questioned Ferguson's interpretation of Kissinger's actions leading up to Nixon's election in 1968 as United States president. Andrew Roberts praised the book in The New York Times, concluding: "Niall Ferguson already has many important, scholarly and controversial books to his credit. But if the second volume of 'Kissinger' is anywhere near as comprehensive, well written and riveting as the first, this will be his masterpiece." The Square and the Tower In 2018's The Square and the Tower, Ferguson proposed a modified version of group selection that history can be explained by the evolution of human networks. He wrote, "Man, with his unrivaled neural network, was born to network." The title refers to a transition from hierarchical "tower" networks to flatter "square" network connections between individuals. In a review of the book, John Gray was not convinced. He wrote, "[Ferguson] offers a mix of metaphor and what purports to be a new science." In The Wall Street Journal, Deirdre McCloskey wrote: "Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book, this time in defence of traditional top-down principles of governing the wild market and the wilder international order. The Square and the Tower raises the question of just how much the unruly world should be governedand by whom. Not everyone will agree, but everyone will be charmed and educated. ... The Square and the Tower is always readable, intelligent, original. You can swallow a chapter a night before sleep and your dreams will overflow with scenes of Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Napoleon, Kissinger. In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it." Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe In this book, Ferguson offers a global history of disaster. Damon Linker of The New York Times argues that the book is "often insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant", and suggests that Ferguson displays "an impressive command of the latest research in a large number of specialized fields, among them medical history, epidemiology, probability theory, cliodynamics and network theory." Linker also criticises the book's "perplexing lacunae". ==Opinions, views and research==

Ferguson has been referred to as a conservative historian by some commentators and fellow historians. Ferguson himself stated in a 2018 interview on the Rubin Report that his views align to classical liberalism, and has referred to himself as a "classic Scottish enlightenment liberal" on other occasions. Some of his research and conclusions have been criticised by commentators on the political left. World War I In 1998, Ferguson published The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, which with the help of research assistants he was able to write in just five months. • That most people were happy with the outbreak of war in 1914 (Ferguson claims that most Europeans were saddened by the coming of war). In Ferguson's view, had Germany won World War I, then the lives of millions would have been saved, something like the European Union would have been founded in 1914, and Britain would have remained an empire as well as the world's dominant financial power. About The Pity of War, the American academic Michael Lind wrote: Like the historian John Charmley, who expressed the same wish in the case of World War II, Ferguson belongs to the fringe element of British conservatism that regrets the absence of a German-British deal in the first half of the 20th century that would have marginalized the United States and might have allowed the British Empire to survive to this day. According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East. The joke is on Ferguson's American conservative admirers, inasmuch as he laments the defeat of the Kaiser's Germany because it accelerated the replacement of the British Empire by the United States of America and the eclipse of the City of London by Wall Street. Weinberg accused Ferguson of completely ignoring the chief foreign policy aim of Wilhelm II from 1897 onwards, namely Weltpolitik ("World Politics"), and argued it was absurd for Ferguson to claim that allowing Germany to defeat France and Russia would have posed no danger to Britain. The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had praised Ferguson as an excellent historian but criticised him as a "nostalgist for empire". In a mixed review of a later book by Ferguson, ''The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred, a reviewer for The Economist'' described how many regard Ferguson's two books on the Rothschilds "as one of the finest studies of its kind". Jeremy Wormell wrote that while ''The World's Banker: A History of the House of Rothschild'' had its virtues, it contained "many errors" which meant it was "unsafe to use it as a source for the debt markets". Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Skidelsky praised Ferguson, stating: "Taken together, Ferguson's two volumes are a stupendous achievement, a triumph of historical research and imagination. No serious historian can write about the connection between the politics, diplomacy, and economics of the nineteenth century in the same way again. And, as any good work of history should do, it constantly prompts us to ask questions about our own age, when once again we have embarked on the grand experiment of a world economy without a world government." Counterfactual history Ferguson sometimes uses counterfactual history, also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history, and edited a collection of essays, titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), exploring the subject. Ferguson likes to imagine alternative outcomes as a way of stressing the contingent aspects of history. For Ferguson, great forces don't make history; individuals do, and nothing is predetermined. Thus, for Ferguson, there are no paths in history that will determine how things will work out. The world is neither progressing nor regressing; only the actions of individuals determine whether we will live in a better or worse world. His championing of the method has been controversial within the field. In a 2011 review of Ferguson's book Civilization: The West and the Rest, Noel Malcolm (senior research fellow in history at All Souls College at Oxford University) stated: "Students may find this an intriguing introduction to a wide range of human history; but they will get an odd idea of how historical argument is to be conducted, if they learn it from this book." Henry Kissinger In 2003, former American secretary of state Henry Kissinger provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries, letters, and archives for what Ferguson calls a "warts-and-all biography" of Kissinger. In 2015, he published the first volume in a two-part biography titled Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist from Penguin Press. The thesis of this first volume was that Kissinger was greatly influenced in his academic and political development by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and especially by an interpretation of Kant that he learned from a mentor at Harvard University, William Yandell Elliott. British Empire Ferguson has defended the British Empire, stating, "I think it's hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home." "informative", "ambitious" and "troubling", to "false and dangerous" apologia. Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, has stated that it was correct of Seumas Milne to associate "Ferguson with an attempt to 'rehabilitate empire' in the service of contemporary great power interests". In November 2011, Pankaj Mishra reviewed Civilisation: The West and the Rest unfavourably in the London Review of Books. Ferguson demanded an apology and threatened to sue Mishra on charges of libel due to allegations of racism. Jon Wilson, a professor of the Department of History at King's College London, is the author of India Conquered, a 2016 book intended to rebut Ferguson's arguments in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, who catalogues the negative elements of the British Raj, and describes the Empire TV program (2003) as "false and dangerous". About Ferguson's claim that Britain "made the modern world" by spreading democracy, free trade, capitalism, the rule of law, Protestantism, and the English language, Wilson charged that Ferguson never explained precisely how this was done, arguing that the reason was the lack of interest in the history of the people ruled by the British on Ferguson's part, who therefore could not perceive that the interaction between the colonisers and the colonised in places like India, where the population embraced aspects of British culture and rule that were appealing to them while rejecting others that were unappealing. Wilson argues that this interaction between the rulers and the ruled is more complex, and contradicts Ferguson's one-sided picture of the British "transforming" India that portrays the British as active and the Indians as passive. providing a cover comment for her 2005 Eurabia book, in which he stated that "no writer has done more than Bat Ye'or to draw attention to the menacing character of Islamic extremism. Future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term 'Eurabia' as prophetic." Matthew Carr wrote in Race & Class that "Niall Ferguson, the conservative English historian and enthusiastic advocate of a new American empire, has also embraced the Eurabian idea in a widely reproduced article entitled 'Eurabia?'", in which he laments the "de-Christianization of Europe" and the secularism of the continent that leaves it "weak in the face of fanaticism". Carr adds that "Ferguson sees the recent establishment of a department of Islamic studies in his (Oxford college) as another symptom of 'the creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom, and in a 2004 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute entitled "The End of Europe?" Ferguson struck a similarly Spenglerian note, conjuring the term "impire" to depict a process in which a 'political entity, instead of expanding outwards towards its periphery, exporting power, implodes—when the energies come from outside into that entity'. In Ferguson's opinion, this process was already under way in a decadent 'post-Christian' Europe that was drifting inexorably towards the dark denouement of a vanquished civilisation and the fatal embrace of Islam. Ferguson deplored the November 2015 Paris attacks committed by Islamic State terrorists but stated he was not going to "stand" with the French as he argued that France was a lost cause, a declining state faced with an unstoppable Islamic wave that would sweep away everything that tried to oppose it. Ferguson compared the modern European Union to the Western Roman Empire, describing modern Europe as not that different from the world depicted by Edward Gibbon in his book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ask yourself how effectively we in the West have responded to the rise of militant Islam since the Iranian Revolution unleashed its Shi'ite variant and since 9/11 revealed the even more aggressive character of Sunni Islamism. I fear we have done no better than our grandfathers did. Foreign intervention—the millions of dollars that have found their way from the Gulf to radical mosques and Islamic centres in the West. Incompetent liberals—the proponents of multiculturalism who brand any opponent of jihad an "Islamophobe". Clueless bankers—the sort who fall over themselves to offer "sharia-compliant" loans and bonds. Fellow travellers—the leftists who line up with the Muslim Brotherhood to castigate Israel at every opportunity. And the faint-hearted—those who were so quick to pull out of Iraq in 2009 that they allowed the rump of al-Qaeda to morph into Isis. A century ago it was the West's great blunder to think it would not matter if Lenin and his confederates took over the Russian Empire, despite their stated intention to plot world revolution and overthrow both democracy and capitalism. Incredible as it may seem, I believe we are capable of repeating that catastrophic error. I fear that, one day, we shall wake with a start to discover that the Islamists have repeated the Bolshevik achievement, which was to acquire the resources and capability to threaten our existence. During a 2018 debate, Ferguson asserted that he is not anti-immigration or opposed to Muslims but felt that sections of Europe's political and intellectual classes had failed to predict the cultural and political consequences of large scale immigration. He stated that Islam differs from Judaism and Christianity through being "designed differently" as a political ideology that does not recognize the separation of mosque with the secular and temporal, and that the Muslim world has mostly followed an opposite trend to Western society by becoming less secularized and more literal in interpreting holy scripture. He concluded that if Europe kept pursuing large scale migration from pious Muslim societies combined with poor structures of economic and cultural integration, especially in an era when existing migrant communities are either unassimilated or loosely integrated into the host society, it is "highly likely" that networks of fundamentalist dawah will grow in which Islamic extremists draw in the culturally and economically unassimilated Muslims of immigrant backgrounds. Ferguson observed that even when living in Western nations, both he and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali have to live with permanent security measures as a result of her public critiques of Islam and status as a former Muslim. and he is on record as being not necessarily opposed to future Western incursions around the world. It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out. Trump eventually won the nomination. After Brexit, Ferguson stated that Trump could win via the Electoral College if certain demographics turned out to vote in key swing states. Three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, after the Access Hollywood tape scandal, Ferguson stated in an interview that it "was over for Donald Trump", that "Trump had flamed out in all three Presidential debates", that "I don't think there can be any last minute surprise to rescue him [Trump]", and that there was no hope of Trump winning Independent voters and that Trump was "gone as a candidate", adding that "it seems to me clear that she [Hillary Clinton] is going to be the first female President of the United States. The only question is how bad does his [Trump's] flaming out affect candidates for the Senate, candidates for the House, further down on the ballot." In 2018, Ferguson argued that a Clinton presidency would have been more disruptive to the United States, and that Clinton would have been "immediately" impeached as Trump supporters would have likely believed that the election was rigged. Ferguson stated that he regarded himself "in the middle ground" in a generally polarized public and media opinion on Trump's presidency. He elaborated that while he found Trump's personality "pretty hard to take", he cited several positive achievements undertaken by his administration, including America's stronger economic performance and noted that he found Trump's foreign policy stances on China, North Korea, and the Middle East an improvement over that of the Obama administration. He further opined that the media was more focused on Trump's behaviour on social media than the "competent job" being done by members of his administration. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that the China–United States trade war was the beginning of a Second Cold War between the United States and China, and that despite the risks of the showdown the introduction of an external enemy similar to the Soviet Union could prove beneficial by reducing political polarization in the United States. During the 2020 United States presidential election, Ferguson observed that contrary to arguments from Trump's opponents that he only appealed to older White men, statistics showed his support among Black and Latino voters had risen. He opined that Joe Biden was likely to win the presidency but that the Democratic Party would not see a "blue wave" of support as it had tried to turn the election into "a referendum on Trump's handling of COVID-19" when there "hasn't been anything exceptionally bad about American performance", and that the Democrats had misjudged the mood of voters concerned about law and order following the Black Lives Matter protests. After the election was concluded, Ferguson stated that both Trump and the "far-left of the Democratic Party" had lost. Ferguson condemned the 2021 United States Capitol attack committed by supporters of Trump, arguing on Twitter that the participants should be prosecuted and Trump's behaviour had cost the Republicans the Senate. He also argued that politicians who refused to condemn the event were unsuited for office. He argued that Trumpism was likely to remain a force within American politics and likened it to Jacobite Pretenders who sought to revolt in order to restore the House of Stuart to the British royal throne after the Glorious Revolution. In September 2023, Ferguson again opined that the Democrats were likely to lose the White House to Trump unless Biden stepped down. He compared Trump's bid to Grover Cleveland who served two non-consecutive terms, argued that Biden was polling similar numbers to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush ahead of elections they lost after one term, and that Biden's desire to keep Kamala Harris as a running mate would harm his campaign due to her even poorer approval ratings. Trump's "New World Order" In an article from November 2016 in The Boston Globe, Ferguson advised that Trump should support the efforts of the prime minister Theresa May to have the United Kingdom leave the European Union as the best way of breaking up the European Union, and sign a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom once Brexit is complete. To stabilise international relations, Ferguson speculated that Trump could give recognition to Russia as a great power, and work with Russian president Vladimir Putin by giving Russia a sphere of influence in Eurasia. • Replacing the personal income tax, corporate income tax, Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax (FICA), estate tax, and gift tax with a 33% Federal Retail Sales Tax (FRST), plus a monthly rebate, amounting to the amount of FRST that a household with similar demographics would pay if its income were at the poverty line, similar to the FairTax proposal. • Replacing the old age benefits paid under Social Security with a Personal Security System, consisting of private retirement accounts for all citizens, plus a government benefit payable to those whose savings were insufficient to afford a minimum retirement income • Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with a universal Medical Security System that would provide health insurance vouchers to all citizens, the value of which would be determined by one's health • Cutting federal discretionary spending by 20% In February 2010, during the Greek government-debt crisis, Ferguson appeared on the Glenn Beck Program predicting that if interest rates rose in the United States, it could experience a similar sovereign default and mass civil disorder to what was occurring in Greece. He also praised the Tea Party movement. Later in the year, he called for the Federal Reserve under chairman Ben Bernanke to end its second round of quantitative easing. In November 2012, Ferguson stated in a video with CNN that the U.S. has enough energy resources to move towards energy independence and could possibly enter a new economic golden age due to the related socio-economic growth—coming out of the post-world economic recession doldrums. Ferguson was an attendee of the 2012 Bilderberg Group meeting, where he was a speaker on economic policy. Ferguson was highly critical of the results of the 2016 European Union referendum, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire". Later, after backing the Remain campaign during the referendum, Ferguson changed his mind and came out in support of Britain's exit from the European Union. Exchanges with Paul Krugman In May 2009, Ferguson became involved in a public exchange of views with economist Paul Krugman arising out of a panel discussion hosted by PEN/New York Review on 30 April 2009, regarding the American economy. Ferguson contended that the Obama administration's policies are simultaneously Keynesian and monetarist in an "incoherent" mix, and specifically claimed that the government's issuance of a multitude of new bonds would cause an increase in interest rates. Krugman argued that Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors". He also stated that Ferguson is a "poseur" who "hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance." In 2012, Jonathan Portes, the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said that subsequent events had shown Ferguson to be wrong: "As we all know, since then both the US and UK have had deficits running at historically extremely high levels, and long-term interest rates at historic lows: as Krugman has repeatedly pointed out, the (IS-LM) textbook has been spot on." After Ferguson wrote a cover story for Newsweek arguing that Mitt Romney should be elected in the 2012 United States presidential election, Krugman wrote that there were multiple errors and misrepresentations in the story, concluding: "We're not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here—just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. [The New York Times] would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?" In an online rebuttal titled "Paul Krugman Is Wrong", Ferguson defended his prior cover story, insisting that it was Krugman who had been wrong on the facts. Matthew O'Brien countered that Ferguson was still distorting the meaning of the Congressional Budget Office report being discussed, and that the entire piece could be read as an effort to deceive. In 2013, Ferguson, naming Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias, and Justin Wolfers, attacked "Krugman and his acolytes" in a three-part essay explaining his dislike of Krugman. The essay title, "Krugtron the Invincible", originally comes from a post by Smith. Remarks on Keynes' sexual orientation At a May 2013 investment conference in Carlsbad, California, Ferguson was asked about his views on economist John Maynard Keynes' quotation that "in the long run we are all dead". Ferguson stated that Keynes was indifferent to the future because he was gay and did not have children. The remarks were widely criticised for being offensive, factually inaccurate, and a distortion of Keynes' ideas. Ferguson posted an apology for these statements shortly after reports of his words were widely disseminated, saying his comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive". In the apology, Ferguson stated: "My disagreements with Keynes's economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life." Stanford Cardinal Conversations In spring 2018, Ferguson was involved with College Republican leaders at Stanford to oppose a left-leaning student take over of the Cardinal Conversations initiative. In leaked emails, he was quoted as asking for opposition research on the student involved. He later apologized and resigned from the said initiative when emails were leaked revealing his involvement in the events. In a statement to The Stanford Daily, Ferguson wrote: "I very much regret the publication of these emails. I also regret having written them." In February 2019, Ferguson became an advisor for digital asset protocol firm Ampleforth Protocol, saying he was attracted by the firm's plan to "reinvent money in a way that protects individual freedom and to create a payments system that treats everyone equally". In March 2019, Ferguson spoke at an Australian Financial Review Business Summit, where he admitted to being "wrong to think there was no ... use for a form of currency based on blockchain technology... I don't think this will turn out to be a complete delusion." Scottish nationalism and the British Union Ferguson has stated that he identified as a Scottish nationalist as a teenager but moderated his views after moving to England to study history. He has argued that Scottish nationalism is sometimes fueled by a distorted view that Scots have always been oppressed by the English and is misconceived by people from outside of the United Kingdom as the choice between being Scottish or English. Ferguson states that in contrast to the subjugations of Wales and Ireland, Scotland was united as an "equal" country to England during the Act of Union of 1707, and cites events such as King James VI of Scotland inheriting the English crown, the failed Darien scheme to colonize Panama, which prompted Scottish political elites to support the Union and that Scots were an integral part of the East India Company to question the narrative that Scotland was oppressed. Ferguson has also argued (citing Walter Scott's novel Waverley) that Scotland after the Jacobite rebellion remained a land divided by warring clans and religious factions, and that the Union helped to quell some of the conflicts. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Ferguson supported Scotland remaining within the United Kingdom, citing potential economic consequences of Scottish independence but argued that the opposition campaign needed to focus on Scotland's history of cosmopolitanism, as well as economic points to save the Union. In 2012, he described the Eurozone as a "disaster waiting to happen". During the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, Ferguson was initially critical of the idea of Britain leaving the EU despite his criticisms of the latter, warning that "the economic consequences will be dire", and endorsed a Remain vote. In 2020, Ferguson predicted that the EU was destined to become "moribund" and was at risk of collapse in the near future and that the single currency had only benefited Northern Europe and Germany in particular while causing economic havoc in Southern Europe. He also argued the "real disintegration of Europe" will happen over the EU's migration policies that he says have both exacerbated and failed to provide solutions to illegal immigration to the European continent from North Africa and the Middle East. Ferguson stated that high levels of illegal immigration from Muslim-majority nations would in turn further the rise of populist and Eurosceptic movements committed to rolling back or leaving the EU. Ferguson also predicted that in a decade's time Britain would question why there had been fuss, outcry, or debates over the manner of how to leave the EU over Brexit because "we'll have left something that was essentially disintegrating", and that "it would be a little bit like getting a divorce and then your ex drops dead, and you spent all that money on the divorce courts, if only you'd known how sick the ex was. The European Union is sick, and people don't really want to admit that, least of all in Brussels." He also dismissed the idea that right-wing populism had been responsible for failure of government responses to the pandemic, accusing liberal politicians such as the then Belgian prime minister Sophie Wilmès and United States president Joe Biden of making similar mistakes to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. In April 2020, he published an op-ed alleging that Chinese authorities deliberately allowed international flights to continue departing Wuhan after the city was placed under quarantine. The claim was subsequently cited by several public figures, including Donald Trump. This allegation was later retracted. He reflected in a 2021 podcast interview with Lex Fridman that many of the failures in the United States had been systemic rather than the personal fault of Trump, and that Trump was unfairly blamed because of the Trump administration's messaging. He alleged that Barack Obama's handling of the U.S. opioid epidemic had been similarly costly but more obscure. Ferguson also praised Operation Warp Speed, and argued that part of the reason for the failure of the U.S. government to effectively respond to the pandemic was the absence of a similar program for COVID-19 testing. He also criticized the 2022 Moscow rally for justifying the invasion and described it as "fascistic". Ferguson has also sharply criticized the accusations of genocide in Gaza, describing such claims as "utterly divorced from strategic reality". Ferguson rejects plans to recognize a Palestinian state insisting that "nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future." He argues that the Palestinian Authority is widely despised and lacks real authority, while Hamas continues to command significant support, even in the West Bank, and remains fundamentally committed to violence. In Ferguson's view, the October 7 attacks should be seen as a decisive moral and political failure: "an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it." He adds that the enduring support for Hamas among Palestinians, and claims due to supposed widespread denial of the October 7 attacks, erodes any claim to statehood. ==Personal life==

Ferguson met journalist Sue Douglas in 1987, when she was his editor at The Sunday Times. They married in 1994, and went on to have three children. In February 2010, Ferguson separated from Douglas and thereafter started dating Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ferguson and Douglas divorced in 2011. Ferguson married Hirsi Ali on 10 September 2011; she gave birth to their son three months later. Upset about the media coverage of his relationship with Hirsi Ali, which implied that he had begun dating her before his first marriage had unraveled, Ferguson stated: "I don't care about the sex lives of celebrities, so I was a little unprepared for having my private life all over the country." Ferguson dedicated his book Civilization to "Ayaan". In an interview with The Guardian, Ferguson spoke about his love for Ali who, he writes in the preface, "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world". In a 2024 interview with Greg Sheridan, Ferguson said that he, Hirsi Ali, and their two sons were baptised in September 2023. Ferguson's self-confessed workaholism has placed strains on his personal relations in the past. In 2011, Ferguson commented: [F]rom 2002, the combination of making TV programmes and teaching at Harvard took me away from my children too much. You don't get those years back. You have to ask yourself: "Was it a smart decision to do those things?" I think the success I have enjoyed since then has been bought at a significant price. In hindsight, there would have been a bunch of things that I would have said no to. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE) in the disciplines of language, literature and history in 2020. On 14 June 2024, Ferguson was awarded a knighthood in the birthday honours list of King Charles III. ==Selected bibliography==

• • • • • • • • • American edition. • • • American ed. has the title: The War of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict and the Descent of the West. (also a Channel 4 series) • • • • • • • ==See also==