Quotes from Niall Ferguson

in Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, where 45 percent of all civilian deaths were people aged fifteen to thirty-five.97 Death was not caused by the influenza virus itself so much as by the body's immunological reaction to the virus. Perversely, this meant that individuals with the strongest immune systems were more likely to die than those with weaker immune systems.

Exchange rates would be fixed, as under the gold standard, but now the anchor - the international reserve currency - would be the dollar rather than gold (though the dollar itself would notionally remain convertible into gold, vast quantities of which sat, immobile but totemic, in Fort Knox).

Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.'51 The threat to world order can be summed up as 'very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x the New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x weapons'.52

There is always home, sweet home. As an insurance policy or a pension plan, however, this strategy has one very obvious flaw. It represents a one-way, totally unhedged bet on one market: the property market. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter, a bet on bricks and mortar is very far from being as safe as houses.

Si no se emplean en las misiones de paz, es difícil saber para qué sirven soldados, en una Europa que ha declarado la paz perpetua dentro de sus fronteras y que ya no es amenazada por Rusia.

The essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural. The essence of bureaucracy is its quest for safety; its success is calculability . . . The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.

In real terms, stocks increased by a factor of 10.3; bonds by a factor of 3.4; bills by a factor of 1.8. Had my parents made the mistake of simply buying $10,000 in dollar bills in 1964, the real value of their son's nest egg would have declined in real terms by 85 per cent.

valley of the clueless

Trump campaign's involvement with the alt-right brought anti-Semitism back

super zip codes', looks increasingly like a new caste, equipped with the wealth and power to override the effects of mean reversion in human reproduction, so that even their dimmer progeny inherit their lifestyle.14

The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.

Roughly two fifths of the world's population is effectively outside the financial system, without access to bank accounts, much less credit.

The best way to rob a bank is to own one.

Facebook relayed the bogus story that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope.

propinquity to power is perceived to matter, especially in a time of crisis.

striving to be a master of the universe

Las tasas de desempleo en la mayoría de los países europeos son también marcadamente más altas que las de Estados Unidos, más del 10 por ciento en Bélgica y España, más de dos veces la tasa de Estados Unidos.Y por

Two years later, to provide some competition in the secondary market, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. The effect was once again to broaden the secondary market for mortgages, and in theory at least to lower mortgage rates.

Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 "The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclear weapons even in a local situation

The rationale for the FDA's rigid standards is to avoid the sale of a drug like thalidomide. But the unintended consequence is almost certainly to allow many more people to die prematurely than would have died from side-effects under a less restrictive regime. We count and recount the costs of such side-effects. We do not count the costs of not allowing new drugs to be made available.

At around the same time, the coffee house owner Thomas Garraway published a broadsheet entitled 'An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA', in which he claimed that it could cure 'Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Liptitude Distillations, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Griping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind'.

With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.

World War I saw the birth of total war, in the sense that it was fought between societies as much as armies.

Trump won 'Trumpland