The Great Degeneration - Niall Ferguson

This is an interesting read on several different levels.
Ferguson raises a number of interesting points about the west's current difficulties and changes in society and culture over the past 30 or 40 years.  He references a number of other important thinkers - Krugman, Stiglitz.  He brings up some important current ideas - rent-seeking, lack of democratic participation, the erosion of civil society and the public space, deregulation/bad regulation in the banking sector, lack of punishment or consequences for the fraudsters responsible for the banking collapse of 2007 - and has intelligent things to say about them.

In the first chapter, he looks at the emergence of rule of law and property rights as the basis for the successful development of western european leaders over the past 300 years.

The central thesis of his book is the decline of western economic leadership due to an erosion of these basic rules (rule of law, property rights) in the most recent decades.  He may have a point but somehow the whole book comes off as just a bit too glib.  When you finish the book, you come out thinking the US is well on its way in a slide to 3rd world status, based on the statistics he sights.  One study he relies heavily on is the World Economic Forums annual report on doing business in countries around the world, so it is worth a side trip to check out this study.

When you look at this WEF study, the US does in fact fair middlingly in many areas evaluated, and poorly in some others, BUT it still retains its overall place of 5th in the whole scheme of things, which does not make it a country or economy in crisis.  Turns out Ferguson cherry picks his stats, possibly to develop his attention-getting theses - he's a bit of a media player, turns out.

It's also worth checking him out on the web.  Turns out he was involved in a dispute with Krugman regarding the US post crisis monetary policy - the subsequent events have proved him wrong on all counts.  He also gave a controversial speech criticizing Obama, heavily analyzed but several columnists and big papers - turns out much of his supporting evidence for the critique was partial truth, cherry-picked bits of studies, misrepresented conclusions and outright fabrication.  This speech also sounds a lot like the work of an apologist for big business and the Republican party - which there are whiffs of in his book, The Great Degeneration, without actually coming out and making it obvious.

Ferguson would be an interesting study to look at how an academic can trade on his credentials in support of a particular ideology.  How facts and statistics can be bent and manipulated in support of an ideology (which would seem to be the opposite of the role of academics.)

*The one idea Ferguson brings up that I consider worth looking at is the idea that many of our social institutions  (education, health, politics etc.) have lost the focus of providing a public service and have become largely focused on catering to the needs of the people working within the institution, rather than the needs of the groups the service focuses on.  I have certainly seen this in the education field...