Ep. 100: Niall Ferguson

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"We need to come to terms with the randomness and unpredictability of disaster."

Support Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk.

The great writer and historian Niall Ferguson is on the show for the 100th episode. His most recent book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, seeks to bring many different catastrophes of history under one umbrella and ask questions about what we as a society can do better. Hardly a history of disaster, the book offers a theory of disasters. Often times, as Niall explains, it is not the boss at the top who is responsible for failure, but a middleman. What nuances do we miss when we evaluate disaster and oversimplify? Are we getting better or worse and handling disaster?
Daniel and Niall also cover a fascinating segment on music, and its potential dangerous intersection with politics.

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing.

He is the author of fifteen 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. In 2001, after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000.

Ferguson was the Philippe Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in 2010-11. His many prizes and awards include the GetAbstract International Book Award (2009), the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2013), the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education (2016); and Columnist of the Year at the 2018 British Press Awards. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham (UK), Macquarie University (Australia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile).

In addition to writing a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm, and a co-founding board member of Ualá, a Latin American bank. He also serves on the board of Affiliated Managers Group and is a trustee of the New York Historical Society and the London-based Centre for Policy Studies.

Niall Ferguson is married to the author and women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He has five children.