Book Review: The Great Degeneration – How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

The Great Degeneration – How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson, 2012, Penguin Press.   Having read some of Ferguson’s other works (Civilization, Colossus, and others) this book is not a shock.  His ideas are honed and rounded, and very much up to date.  If you do not know his ‘history’, this book might shock you.  “Public debt…has become a way for the older generation to live at the expense of the young and unborn.  Regulation has become dysfunctional to the point of increasing the fragility of the system.  And civil society withers into a mere no man’s land between corporate interests and big government.”  These three threads, debt, regulation/state, and civil society, are all in the wrong place and Ferguson explores history (Adam Smiths’ stationary state, Alexis de Tocqueville, and more) very well to show where this pattern has been seen before.  From a political perspective this book, only 153 pages long, is scary.  There are virtually no signs of any public body that is able to argue the case, let alone begin the change needed to “fix” our ills.  We, the people, have become accustomed to the drug (we might call “statism”) and we are hooked.  I wish the book had been longer; I enjoy listening to Ferguson’s ideas.  But I guess his point is, at last, simple and does not need much more.  If you have an interest in the economic, political and institutional malaise that we experience, you have to read this book.  Maybe when enough of us have, we can start a new civil movement.  More than recommended.  15 out of 10.