Quotes from Niall Ferguson

Original Design.' The bell curve that we encountered in Chapter 3 represents the normal distribution, in which 68.2 per cent of outcomes are within one standard deviation (plus or minus) of the mean.

Why is it now a hundred times more expensive to bring a new medicine to market than it was sixty years ago Ã¢â'¬â€œ a phenomenon Juan Enriquez has called 'Moore's Law* in reverse'? Why would the Food and Drug Administration probably prohibit the sale of table salt if it were put forward as a new pharmacological product (it is after all toxic in large doses)?11

The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history's most successful narco-state: the British Empire.

People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census.

those who live by the tort, die by the tort.

paradoxically, the people who live in the world's safest country are also the world's most insured.

A project such as this depends heavily on the expertise and toil of archivists and librarians.

on Facebook 'the user is the product

how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight.

The popular view was that (as in the 1790s) the blood tax – l'impôt du sang – should be borne by all

relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or 'intermediated' by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and risk management.

Consideramos evidentes estas verdades: que los hombres son creados iguales; que han sido dotados por el Creador de ciertos derechos inalienables; que estos derechos son la vida, la libertad y la búsqueda de la felicidad».

achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.

We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation

After the creation of credit by banks, the birth of the bond was the second great revolution in the ascent of money.

the air was filled with obscure ideas

The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian 'coolies'. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border.

For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.

Nowadays he is best remembered for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), in which each successive number is the sum of the previous two, and the ratio between a number and its immediate antecedent tends towards a 'golden mean' (around 1.618). It

There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.

The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism.

According to Law, confidence alone was the basis for public credit; with confidence, banknotes would serve just as well as coins. 'I have discovered the secret of the philosopher's stone, he told a friend, 'it is to make gold out of paper.'40 The Duke demurred, saying 'I am not rich enough to ruin myself.

primera sociedad de masas consumidoras del mundo.

For the majority of mortgages continued to enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government-sponsored trio of Fannie, Freddie or Ginnie, meaning that bonds which used those mortgages as collateral could be represented as virtually government bonds, and hence 'investment grade'.