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" It's not surprising so many people end up with credit-card debts. Saving for your retirement and buying a house are difficult things, and we don't educate people about them at all. "
Niall Ferguson
Things
End
House
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" We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right. "
Niall Ferguson
Psychology
Right
Risk
" There aren't many people who really put their life on the line for human freedom. "
Niall Ferguson
Who
Life
Human
" The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction. "
Niall Ferguson
Human
You
Dead
" It's all very well for us to sit here in the West with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out. "
Niall Ferguson
Life
Freedom
People
" In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England. "
Niall Ferguson
General
Felt
England
" Risk models are a substitute for historical knowledge, because they tend to work with just three years' worth of data. But three years is not a long time in financial history. "
Niall Ferguson
Knowledge
Long
Time
" President Obama's biggest weakness is weakness. "
Niall Ferguson
President
Biggest
Weakness
" Only in England would 'professor gets divorced and remarried' be a story. "
Niall Ferguson
England
Professor
Story
" Over time, the welfare state has become dysfunctional in a surprising way. But in a way it became a victim of its own success: It became so successful at prolonging life, that it becomes financially unsustainable, unless you make major changes to things like retirement ages. "
Niall Ferguson
Retirement
Success
Time
" The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers. "
Niall Ferguson
Fear
Good
Great
" If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx's doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I'm rightwing. "
Niall Ferguson
Humanity
Being
Thinking
" I can't think of anything I would rather do with my money than buy my children the best possible education. "
Niall Ferguson
Money
Children
Best
" I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one. "
Niall Ferguson
Liberal
19th-Century
Even
" I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month. "
Niall Ferguson
Month
Kids
Three
" I'm over-industrious, so I don't feel quite such a deviant in America as I did in England. "
Niall Ferguson
America
Did
England
" What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up. "
Niall Ferguson
Years
Up
Time
" One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers. "
Niall Ferguson
Law
Lawyers
Great
" As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet. "
Niall Ferguson
Encourage
You
Teacher
" A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible. "
Niall Ferguson
Time
Possible
Remember
" I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "
Niall Ferguson
Brother
Big
Conversation
" Ask me not, 'Are you rightwing,' but ask me 'Are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment?' Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the 'Wealth of Nations' and the 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' then I'm rightwing. "
Niall Ferguson
Freedom
Moral
Values
" When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. "
Niall Ferguson
First
Public
Oxford
" I was never a very convincing social conservative, and always avoided associating myself with that part of the broader conservative movement. "
Niall Ferguson
Myself
Conservative
Never
" Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie. "
Niall Ferguson
Great
Appreciated
Sympathy
" The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement. "
Niall Ferguson
Problems
Poverty
People
" Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to. "
Niall Ferguson
Recipe
Almost
Because
" As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there. "
Niall Ferguson
Quality
Life
Kings
" The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one. "
Niall Ferguson
Me
Looking
Intelligent
" Through pure accident of birth, I've managed to stay relatively youthful. "
Niall Ferguson
Stay
Through
Accident
" Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it. "
Niall Ferguson
Engaging
Violence
Species