Known for movies
Short Info
Date Of Birth | April 18, 1964 |
Spouse | Ayaan Hirsi Ali (m. 2011), Sue Douglas (m. 1994–2011) |
Fact | Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. |
Niall Ferguson is a British historian and author. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Ferguson has written fourteen books, including The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008) and The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018).
Thanks to @JGForsyth for recommending that the next prime minister read my old collection of counterfactual essays, Virtual History: https://t.co/flzxoSRU4k pic.twitter.com/vmneBPLqL0
— Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) July 28, 2022
Ferguson was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 18 April 1964, the son of James Campbell Ferguson, a doctor, and Molly Ferguson (née Knox), a social worker. He has two younger brothers, Malcolm and Colin. Ferguson was educated at Glasgow Academy, where he was dux of his class, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history in 1985.
Ferguson’s first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and the Rise of the Third Reich (1995), was based on his doctoral thesis. It was followed by The Pity of War (1998), a re-examination of the causes of the First World War. In 2000, Ferguson published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000, which looked at the relationship between economics and politics from a historical perspective.
In 2004, Ferguson published Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, which examined the United States’ global role in the early 21st century. In 2006, he released The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, a history of the world during the first half of the 20th century.
Ferguson’s most recent book is The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018), which looks at the role of networks in history.
Ferguson has been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, and New York University. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Ferguson has been married three times. His first marriage was to Susan Douglas-Scott, with whom he has two sons. His second marriage was to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician and author. They have one son. His third marriage is to Louise Mensch, a British journalist and author. They have two children.
Ferguson has an estimated net worth of $25 million.
General Info
Full Name | Niall Ferguson |
Date Of Birth | April 18, 1964 |
Profession | Author, Professor, Historian |
Education | The Glasgow Academy, Magdalen College, Oxford, Christ's College, Cambridge, Peterhouse, Cambridge |
Family
Spouse | Ayaan Hirsi Ali (m. 2011), Sue Douglas (m. 1994–2011) |
Children | Thomas Ferguson |
Parents | Molly Ferguson, Campbell Ferguson |
Accomplishments
TV Shows | The War of the World |
Social profile links
Quotes
# | Quote |
---|---|
1 | [on 'why there is no longer a penalty for reckless mistakes and negligence'] This is puzzling thing, and I think it's one of the unintended consequences of regulatory pathology. If you create these enormous edifices of regulation, as well as choking growth, you make it so all people have to do to stay out of jail is to be compliant. They don't necessarily have to do the right thing, they just have to be able to say, 'We complied with the regulations', and then if there's any further issue there's a civil suit and you pay your $100-million fine and carry on - which was the case in more than a few instances during the financial crisis. There's no discretion for a supervisory authority to say, 'Thia is a bad guy, we're going to revoke his licence', or even send him to jail. |
2 | When I'm trying to cheer myself up about the prospect of, say, Afghanistan, I remind myself that Scotland was the Afghanistan of 17th century Europe - warring mountain tribesmen and religious zealots in the lowlands, and one-hundred years later you have the Scottish Enlightenment. |
3 | Under democracy, the young and unborn are always disenfranchised and it doesn't really matter whether there are lots of them or relatively few of them. What we've seen post-1945 is that they are potential victims of a consistent policy that postpones payment, championed by politicians who desperately want the cost of whatever they do to be borne by future generations. It boils down to intergenerational inequity. We should just start accounting honestly for public finances instead of using these dodgy conventions that any company could be convicted of fraud for using. Start looking at governments in the way that we look at companies and ask, 'Where's the balance sheet? What are the liabilities? What are the assets? What is the time horizon beyond ten years?' |
4 | It's clear that the most important issue in China is not should they have elections, which seems a long way off, but should the Communist Party be subject to an independent judiciary, which it currently isn't. That's the big question that remains to be solved there, and it will be resolved pretty soon. We should recognize what are the really important institutional changes and not kid ourselves that if you hold elections in, say, Egypt, everything's going to be fine. |
5 | I'm not sure there's anything 'triumphalist' about the writing I've done. There are people who like to pretend that I am a neo-conservative triumphalist, which I never was. They just never bothered to read my books because it's much easier just to make these things up. |
6 | We have fallen into the trap of believing that very, very complex laws addressing every conceivable contingency are good. But,in fact, common-law systems in England and in North America were once highly conducive to economic innovation because they adapted, they were evolutionary rather than prescriptive. We have slipped into what I call codification mania, a very dangerous road to go down, leading to the rule of law being replaced by the rule of lawyers because the rules are no longer transparent or simple, nor is access to justice relatively easy. |
Facts
# | Fact |
---|---|
1 | Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. |
Movies
Writer
Title | Year | Status | Character |
---|---|---|---|
Civilization: Is the West History? | 2011 | TV Series documentary 1 episode | |
The Ascent of Money | 2008 | TV Movie documentary book | |
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World | 2003 | TV Series documentary |
Thanks
Title | Year | Status | Character |
---|---|---|---|
Almost | 2008 | Short special thanks |
Self
Title | Year | Status | Character |
---|---|---|---|
Fox Files | 2016 | TV Series | Himself - Harvard University |
Fareed Zakaria GPS | 2012-2016 | TV Series | Himself / Himself - Guest |
Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo | 2015 | TV Series | Himself - Author, Kissinger 1936-1968 |
This Week | 2006-2014 | TV Series | Himself |
Newsnight | 2014 | TV Series | Himself - Contributor |
America: Imagine the World Without Her | 2014 | Documentary | Himself |
The Pity of War | 2014 | TV Movie documentary | |
Charlie Rose | 2011-2013 | TV Series | Himself - Guest |
Real Time with Bill Maher | 2009-2013 | TV Series | Himself - Guest / Himself |
Piers Morgan Tonight | 2013 | TV Series | Himself |
Valentino's Ghost | 2012 | Documentary | Himself |
The Hour | 2011 | TV Series | Himself |
Tavis Smiley | 2008-2011 | TV Series | Himself |
The Colbert Report | 2008-2011 | TV Series | Himself / Himself - Guest |
Civilization: Is the West History? | 2011 | TV Series documentary | Himself - Presenter |
Question Time | 1993-2011 | TV Series | Himself |
CNBC Originals | 2010 | TV Series | Himself - Financial Historian |
Glenn Beck | 2009 | TV Series | Himself - Author, 'The Ascent of Money' / Harvard Professor |
The Ascent of Money | 2008 | TV Movie documentary | Narrator |
The World Without US | 2008 | Video documentary | Himself - U.K., History Professor, Oxford |
The War of the World | 2006 | TV Movie documentary | |
The Sunday Programme | 2003-2006 | TV Series | Himself |
American Colossus | 2004 | TV Movie documentary | Presenter |
American Experience | 2003 | TV Series documentary | Himself |
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World | 2003 | TV Series documentary | Himself - Presenter |
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century | 1996 | TV Mini-Series | Himself |
Source: IMDb, Wikipedia