Niall Ferguson summarises Western society’s “viruses”

Just read an essay in Newsweek adapted from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest, in which one of his final paragraphs really resonated with me. He is talking about the US but I think it applies to all of the West:

What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Those four or five points are the reason I’m about to start studying sociology and why I enjoy the journalism of my favourite American, British and European publications. And I live in London because it’s at the heart of the action.

The article also draws comparisons between America’s decline and the collapse of history’s great societies. Read it here.

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