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Niall Ferguson

Author, 'The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook'

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for 12 years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

He is the author of 14 books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.

His latest book is The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2017).

Agents of revolution: How 500 years of social networks shaped humanity

Facebook might be the biggest social network but it’s far from the first, despite what those in Silicon Valley will have you believe.

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Political extremism in America? Blame Facebook and Twitter, not Russia.

“Anybody who expected a wonderful happy global community to form on the Internet in which everybody would share cat videos has been gravely disappointed.”

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Big Think Books

Can Silicon Valley save the world? Or are social networks ruining everything?

“At times, it seems as if we are condemned to try to understand our own time with conceptual frameworks more than half a century old.” Historian Niall Ferguson says it’s time for an update.

The feats and failures of hierarchical power: Stalin, Xi Jinping, Macbeth

Countries with top-down power hierarchies get things done quickly—but they just can’t last.

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Why It’s Better to Study History Than Economics

Niall Ferguson: I’m constantly struck by the levels of historical ignorance that I encounter. In rooms full of very well-paid financial professionals, nobody appears to have read any of the major works of financial history of the last 30 or 40 years.

Global Competition, In Perspective

For every one Western 17-year-old boy there are about 28 Chinese boys the same age working twice as hard to get the lifestyle that our one Western kid assumes will be his.

How Much More Can Downsized Workforce Work?

Businesses are reaching the limits of what they can squeeze out of a downsized workforce.

Complexity Theory in 2 Minutes

Complexity theory is about adaptive systems that teeter on the edge of chaos.

Fixing Education: Where Do We Begin?

Niall Ferguson: going on a world tour and seeing which systems do the best job seems like a pretty good starting place to me.

Don’t Look at Technology as a Job Killer. It Makes Us More Productive

We’ve seen more and more human functions be transferred to machines, to robots, to computers, we haven’t all in fact grown poorer.

How Education Will Fix Itself

Let’s suppose you are running the perfect state, the perfect government. You would want to go on a little world tour before you got down to business to see the […]

Social Mobility is More Important Than Equality

When you have a very rigid society without social mobility the underachieving kids of overachieving parents get a privileged run and get helped into colleges they shouldn’t really be getting into.

How Complexity Theory Illuminates History

Complex systems can fall apart really quickly if they tip over the edge of chaos.

The United States’ Two Futures

If the U.S. can use its political and technological advances to grow its way out of this crisis, then the future could be rosy. The other option is much grimmer.

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China Doesn’t Need Us Anymore

The country sees its relationship with the U.S. marriage on the rocks and “is actively looking, if not for another partner, then certainly for a divorce from this somewhat unreliable […]

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The Decline of the West?

There are six killer applications that made the West dominant over the past 500 years. But is that age now over?

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Historians Can Predict the Future

Those with historical understanding of past scenarios are likely to be better at visualizing what’s to come. After all, at the heart of the historian’s enterprise is the imagination

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Big Think Interview With Niall Ferguson

A conversation with the Harvard University historian.

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Who is America?

An empire in denial.

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What is your counsel?

Glorify peace, not war.

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Whom would you like to interview?

If you forced his hand, probably Stalin.

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What is your question?

A lesson from an investment banker.

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Greed and fear are high on the list.

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Nuclear non-proliferation is today’s single most important issue.

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What is your outlook?

The American empire is waning, ethnic hatred is growing and economic stability is crumbling.

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How do you contribute?

Finding understanding.

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What inspires you?

Too many arguments are simplistic, Ferguson says.

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Niall Ferguson on Belief

Historian Niall Ferguson on worshiping Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Issac Newton.

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The End of History?

Niall Ferguson believes that if we destroy human civilization, we certainly destroy history.

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Documentary makers in the United States, particularly, like to represent World War II as a kind of morality play.

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