The Great Degeneration | Niall Ferguson at Brain Bar

The Great Degeneration: How institutions decay and economies die.
Author, pundit and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's holographic speech at Brain Bar 2015.

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Brain Bar, the biggest European festival on the future brings together the world’s most exciting visions. Lively, ambitious and unique, Brain Bar creates the stage for top trendsetters, decision-makers and challengers to exchange ideas in unusual and unrestrained conversation.

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[maoldhomhnaigh]

Niall, you go forward when you can go forward. You don't sort everything out beforehand. You load the bases sometimes, because you have no choice and it is politics after all. Fiscal imbalances is a strong force and you don't sort that out beforehand. You sort that out in an air of crisis.

[TheFormerkgbchief]

I was at this event. This is not how it went down. This was take 2. The lecture was billed as the first holographic speech in the history of Central and Eastern Europe. However the Orban government organisers messed up his "dramatic entrance" and initially a three-foot Niall appeared, without volume, for around two minutes. The staff were running around panicked. Eventually the organisers got on it, and "rewound" Niall like a VHS, which was even funnier than "him" being three foot tall. Finally we got his lecture, which espoused the advantages of the Protestant work ethic, but ironically was a complete rehash of previous Niall lectures 🤑Niall is a hack, and his Hungarian far-right paymasters are offering third-rate version of reality.

[alancharles]

Sound quality not great unfortunately, cuts out around 25 minutes and then has some very annoying background noise for a couple of minutes. I assumed this was the sound of some Keynesian advocate's brain melting in the audience.

[richardouvrier]

low inflation mitigated by German fiscal inputs.

[richardouvrier]

economic fiscal austerity like Germany's.