A Discussion On American Debt, It's Impact On American Defense, And Solutions To This Crisis

Niall Ferguson On The Future Of America's Economy -- Real Clear Politics

Niall Ferguson at the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival: I'm a financial historian by training, but I also teach a course at Harvard with the grandiose title, "Western Ascendancy: Mainsprings of Global Power." And one of my great concerns in teaching that course...is to ask why it was that after around 1490, completely against what anybody at the time would have expected, a small group of pretty impoverished and fractious kingdoms on the western end of Eurasia and Europe ended up taking over the world, and the great oriental empires--not least being China--stagnated and were ultimately subordinate. The question I posed to my class last year was: Have we arrived at the endpoint of, say, half a millennium of Western predominance? And is that one of these historical changes so huge that we just can't get our heads around it?

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Hat Tip: Defense Industry Daily

My Comment: Of all the modern day historians that I enjoy reading and watching, Niall Ferguson has been one who has always been on the top of my list. He does not disappoint in this article.