Last night on Lateline there was an interview with financial historian, Niall Ferguson. Times like these certainly benefit from some historical perspective; if you really want to understand what's going on, watching this will help!
Here's the link to the Lateline website, the video is there on the front page. You can also see the transcript here.
3 comments:
I'm not sure about Ferguson. An intelligent bloke, sure, but I can't bring myself to trust anyone who can view four hundred years of Empire from a purely economic viewpoint.
Or something.
Well it's fair to have your misgivings, but allow me to explain the reasons why I enjoyed hearing his opinions so much:
In Australia, and perhaps in the country that you're from (UK? US? AUS? NZ?) the popular media only reports on CURRENT events that happened TODAY or YESTERDAY. One of my favourite historians, Fernand Braudel explains how fickle this can be; events are like the white froth on the ocean, it'll arise and disappear in an instance depending on the wind and currents. Should we be paying attention to the froth at the top, or to the deeper swell beneath. The 10 metre swell of a tsunami can form and travel through the deeper ocean for kilometres without showing any froth on the surface. Then people panic when the swell hits the shallows and the tsunami rears its disastrous head.
This is why I was happy to see Niall Ferguson on TV giving his perspective,... he's more interested in the swells and the tides: which, 99% of the time is completely ignored on our popular media.
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