145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes

145 | Niall Ferguson on Histories, Networks, and Catastrophes

The world has gone through a tough time with the COVID-19 pandemic. Every catastrophic event is unique, but there are certain commonalities to how such crises play out in our modern interconnected world. Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book from a couple of years ago, The Square and the Tower, that considered how an interplay between networks and hierarchies has shaped the history of the world. This analysis is directly relevant to how we deal with large-scale catastrophes, which is the subject of his new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. We talk about global culture as a complex system, and what it means for our ability to respond to crisis.

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Niall Ferguson received his D.Phil. degree from the University of Oxford. He is currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of numerous book, several of which have been adapted into television documentaries, and has helped found several different companies. He won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money, and has previously been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.


Jaksot(415)

AMA | July 2025

AMA | July 2025

Welcome to the July 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

7 Heinä 20254h 3min

320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe

320 | Solo: Complexity and the Universe

Our universe started out looking very simple: hot, dense, smooth, rapidly expanding. According to our best current model, it will end up looking simple once again: cold, dark, empty. It's in between -...

30 Kesä 20252h 14min

319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

It is common to refer to philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." But in the original quote, Alfred North Whitehead was more careful: he limited his characterization to "the European philosophi...

23 Kesä 20251h 12min

318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

Economics is seeing an upsurge in the importance of controlled, reproducible empirical studies. One area where this has had a great impact is on development economics, which studies the economies of l...

16 Kesä 20251h 20min

317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

The human brain is extremely complicated, but decades of careful neuroscientific research have revealed quite a bit about how it works, including how certain genes affect particular brain behaviors. N...

9 Kesä 20251h 14min

AMA | June 2025

AMA | June 2025

Welcome to the June 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

2 Kesä 20253h 23min

316 | Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

316 | Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper

Einstein's general theory of relativity, plus some reasonable assumptions about the universe and what it's made of, has a remarkable implication: that as we trace cosmic evolution into the far past, w...

26 Touko 20251h 28min

315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability

315 | Branden Fitelson on the Logic and Use of Probability

Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: apples fall downward from trees. But how can you really know? A...

19 Touko 20251h 28min

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