Quotes from Niall Ferguson

without efficient public plumbing cities are death-traps

Between a half and two-thirds of all Europeans who migrated to North America between 1650 and 1780 did so under contracts of indentured servitude;

he later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or $22,500 for every hour his law firm worked.

there is nothing safer than lending money to people with property. Why? Because if they default on the loan, you can repossess the house. Even if they run away

Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them.

The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.

money: a unit of account, a store of value - portable power.

happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society. The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.

interaction of these few civilizations with one another, as much as with their own environments, has been among the most important drivers of historical change.10 The striking thing about these interactions is that authentic civilizations seem to remain true unto themselves for very long periods, despite outside influences. As Fernand Braudel put it: 'Civilization is in fact the longest story of all . . . A civilization . . . can persist through a series of economies or societies.

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression Fuck off.'   

los inversores prefieren colocar su dinero en países donde los derechos de la propiedad privada estén protegidos de manera eficaz, aunque esto debería ser considerado como un requisito mínimo. En

Desde que en 1579 se hubieron sacudido del dominio español, los holandeses habían estado a la vanguardia del capitalismo europeo. Habían creado un sistema de deuda pública que permitía al gobierno tomar empréstitos de sus ciudadanos a un tipo de interés bajo. Habían fundado una institución parecida a un banco central moderno. Su moneda era sólida. Su sistema impositivo basado en los impuestos internos era simple y eficaz.

The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, the municipalities of Rana, Hemnes, Hattjelldal and Narvik invested some $120 million of their taxpayers' money in CDOs secured on American subprime mortgages.

En la práctica el dinero invertido en una colonia de iure como la India (o en una colonia en todo sentido, excepto el nombre como Egipto) era mucho más seguro que invertir en una colonia de facto como Argentina.

The final National Strategic Target List specified 1,050 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons, including 151 urban-industrial assets. Even the minimal version of the plan envisioned 650 DGZs being hit by over 1,400 weapons with a total yield of 2,100 megatons.

In the Philippines, formalizing home ownership was until recently a 168-step process involving fifty-three public and private agencies and taking between thirteen and twenty-five years.

Como señalaba Hayek: «Sostener que debemos planificar de forma deliberada la sociedad moderna porque se ha vuelto demasiado compleja es, por tanto, paradójico, y el resultado de un malentendido total [...]. Lo cierto es, más bien, que podemos preservar un orden de semejante complejidad [...] solo de manera indirecta reforzando y mejorando las reglas que conducen a la formación de un orden espontáneo».

También explica por qué Gran Bretaña pudo superar a sus rivales ibéricos: precisamente porque, por ser una recién llegada a la carrera imperial, tuvo que dedicarse a colonizar los pocos prometedores páramos de Virginia y Nueva Inglaterra, antes que las ciudades de México y Perú, donde el saqueo estaba a la orden del día.

The aim of Cold War competition in the third world was not to win a contest between rival models of economic development but above all to fill(...) a spiritual void, for even Communism has made many more converts through the theological quality of Marxism than through the materialistic aspect on which it prides itself.

No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.

los regímenes constitucionales basados en el imperio de la ley son a su vez más susceptibles de experimentar revoluciones financieras que alienten tanto la inversión extranjera como la formación interna de capital. Una

six degrees of Monica Lewinsky

Ch? khi nào ng??i gá»­i ti?n Ä'Æ°a ti?n c?a mình vào các ngân hàng thì s? ti?n Ä'ó má»›i chuy?n d?ch t? v?n nhàn rá»—i tá»›i nh?ng ng??i ch?m ch?

The principle of limited liability was implied: shareholders stood to lose only their investment in the company and no other assets in the event that it failed.15