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Niall Ferguson | Munk Debates

EPISODE #25

Niall Ferguson

Historian and best-selling author Niall Ferguson joins us for a conversation about history's lessons for the world after COVID19.

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Niall Ferguson
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About this episode

The question we are all starting to ask ourselves is what will the world look like post-COVID-19? How will this global pandemic change everything from our politics to our culture to global affairs? Historian Niall Ferguson joins us for an insightful conversation about history's lessons for what the world will look like after COVID19.

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Guests

Niall Ferguson

"I don't think there's any guarantee that the world will have an 'after' COVID-19. COVID-19 might become a permanent feature of our lives the way that influenza has."

Niall Ferguson

"I don't think there's any guarantee that the world will have an 'after' COVID-19. COVID-19 might become a permanent feature of our lives the way that influenza has."

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. In addition to writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm. His most recent book, The Square and the Tower, was published in the U.S. in 2018, and was a New York Times bestseller.

Show Notes

You can order a copy of Niall's The Square and the Tower here.

Niall recommends reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy, which he called "one of a great many works of science fiction that I've read over the last year." It's a dystopian series about a catastrophic pandemic that wipes out most of humanity. He said, "it's for me, in fact, quite helpful to read an imaginary catastrophic dystopian plague book. It puts our own historically, relatively modest pandemic into perspective." You can read more about the series here.

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