Niall Ferguson. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin, 2008

Highly placed American academics are hardly a brave crowd. If in Visconti's "The Damned" it was Hitler's ascent to power, which prompted the head of the industrialists' clan to search for the corporate heir agreeable to the regime, Harvard mandarins were needed only a Bush to read a writing on the wall and appoint the neocon author of the "Empire" and "Colossus" to the faculty. Though, NF brought indefatiguable ability to half-bake his biased and highly inaccurate compilations faster than I can review them, british accent and other qualities of a media star to the hub where kids of the rich and powerful can mingle together without a threat of being diluted by working-class riff-raff. Harvard's financial aid for the needy starts at below $170,000 of family income(2007), yet, only ~20% of the student body presently belong to these depths of poverty. Even Michiko Kakutani, the "New York Times" book reviewer spotted that "the readers are better off with ..."Manias, Panics and Crashes" by ... Kindelberger and ... Aliber and "Extraodinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," a Charles McKay classic."

The book is absolutely monstrous in its inaccuracy and lack of professional approach to what I thought was science. It is full of flagrant and meaningless statements such as: "What are the common factors shared by financial world and a true evolutionary system - 'Genes', in the sense that certain business practices perform the same role as genes in biology, allowing information to be stored in the 'organizational memory' and passed from individual to individual or from firm to firm when the new form is created?" or "Take the case of retail and commercial banking, where there remains considerable biodiversity"(p. 352). While relationships between firms, their clients and owners are frequently discussed in terms of copulation, it does not produce progeny.

Here is another pearl of Niall's wit and wisdom: "The difference is, of course, that whereas giant asteroids (like the one that eliminated 85 per cent of species at the end of Cretaceous period) are exogenous shocks, financial crises are endogenous of financial system." First, asteroid is blamed for the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe, which eliminated the dinosaurs. The evidence for the Permian-Triassic "Great Extinction", to which 85% is referring, is much more sketchy. Second, throughout the entire book he speaks about the exogenous shocks to the financial system such as collapse of the world trade in the wake of the World War I. Is he competing with the proverbial student of the German gymnasium who made more spelling errors in one word than there were letters? Like the book by Lord Smail (reviewed in Jan. 2008), this is drivel by a well-connected member of academic aristocracy who obviously spends no time in archives (if he considers himself historian), studying financial data (if he is a financier), or economic models (if he is an economist). Yet, he is a TV star, like Paris Hilton.