A Financial History of the World: An Evolutionary Perspective by Niall Ferguson, Lecture notes of Statistics

Download A Financial History of the World: An Evolutionary Perspective by Niall Ferguson and more Lecture notes Statistics in PDF only on Docsity! The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. By Niall Ferguson. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008. Pp. vi, 441. $29.95.) This book scans the financial history of the world from ancient Mesopotamia to the beginnings of the current sub-prime mortgage crisis. The author describes the primary objective of this exercise: “Like my last three books, The Ascent of Money was from its earliest inception a television series as well as a book” (360). The titles and subject matter of the six chapters of the book correspond to the six programs in the series narrated by Ferguson that appeared on Channel 4 in the UK and PBS in America. In turn, credit creation, the bond market, financial bubbles, risk, real estate, and globalization are examined in the stylish prose of the Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, also a research associate at Jesus College, Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. The numerous reviews that have already appeared for this book generally find the book to be enjoyable reading and a recommended addition for public libraries and undergraduate collections. The strongest criticisms come from two directions: those uncomfortable with the Milton Friedmanesque economic conservatism which underpins all Ferguson’s published contributions; and, those most familiar with the financial subject matter being examined. While explicitly recognizing that writing a financial history of the world is “an impossible task” (13), Ferguson takes inspiration from the groundbreaking 1973 BBC documentary The Ascent of Man which traces the impact of science and technology on human development. The connection of that project with The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin comes full circle in the “Afterword: The Descent of Money” (341-58) where Ferguson advances a Darwinian-like argument that financial practices and instruments evolve through a natural process of creation, selection and destruction: “I might equally well have called the book The Descent of Finance, for the story I have told is authentically evolutionary” (358). Unfortunately, such grandiose objectives are undermined by the