Ferguson's "Great Degeneration" and How Things Are Getting Worse

I just picked up a copy of Niall Ferguson's 2012 book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. He says: Look, there are four things a society needs to get right. He calls them black boxes.

1. Democracy meaning the political black box.
2. Capitalism meaning the economic black box.
3. Rule of Law meaning the legal black box.
4. Civil Society meaning the social interaction black box.

Obviously there are ways in which each of these black boxes and work well and interact well with the other black boxes. And there are ways in which they degenerate and make things worse, both in their internal operations and in their interactions with the other black boxes.

Ferguson creates a beehive metaphor and uses it to analyze our present political situation.

In politics, Ferguson asks if we are creating too many dependent drones for the worker-bees to support. And in economics, Ferguson asks if we are creating problems when corporations play an active part in political life and governments distort the economy with subsidies, tariffs and regulation. In law he asks if the rule of law has not degenerated in the the rule of lawyers. In civil society he asks how a free society can flourish when its voluntary associations -- created for objectives other than profit -- are in decline.

So, he argues, we should be putting curbs on the ability of the political system to distribute loot and plunder, and in particular for the elder generation to loot the younger generation through explicit and implicit debt.

In the economy we should be limiting the power of regulation to encourage a house price bubble that leads to the Great Recession of 2008, where regulation and government supervision creates a more fragile system. Shouldn't regulation make a system more "anti-fragile" that "becomes stronger when subject to perturbation."

In law we should be encouraging a system that develops "low-cost enforcement of contracts." One measure of the health of the legal system is the length of time and the expense of setting up a new business. Ferguson prefers the Anglo-Saxon "common law" to the Continental "civil law." 

When it comes to civil society, Ferguson cites his experience in "clearing the beach" at his house on the coast of South Wales. When he moved in the beach was cluttered with rubbish, from plastic bottles and bags to beer and soft-drink cans. When he found that the local council would not help, he organized volunteers to clear the beach. After a couple of beach cleans the Lions Club got involved.

The Lions brought a level of organization and motivation that far exceeded my earlier improvised efforts. As a result of their involvement the shoreline was transformed.

Yeah. Maybe we should apply the civil-society model to all kinds of other things, from education to welfare.

Of course, everything that Niall Ferguson proposes is, to me, conventional wisdom -- my conventional wisdom: the sensible things we should be doing -- should always be doing -- at the political, economic, legal, and lifeworld level to regenerate the health of our society. And not just once, but all the time.

But our lefty friends want to do the opposite. And reading the book made me realize just how crazy things have gotten since 2012.

One of the things that Ferguson warns about is debt: that government debt is a generational charge on the young generation. Our lefty friends are heaping debt upon debt. One of the things he warns against is loading too much regulation that distributes political favors around and, like in mortgage finance, makes the economy more fragile. One of the things he warns against is the rule of the lawyers. But our lefty friends are all over the legal system trying to enforce changes that they cannot get by legislation and the political process. One of the vital parts of human society is the social lubrication of civil society organizations; the only thing our lefty friends understand are AstroTurf activist organizations.

In other words, if you accept Niall Ferguson's world view, you can't help feeling that everything our lefty friends are doing and want to do are making things worse.

And the reason for all this isn't mysterious. As the educated elite has enforced its political formula, of allies helping oppressed peoples against white oppressors, the ordinary middle-class commoners have staged an organic Great Rebellion that switched Congress to the Republicans and then elected Donald Trump as president.

For now, after herculean effort, the ruling class has rolled back the Rebels. But, as they said of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and instead are doubling down on the agenda that Niall Ferguson judges is the cause of The Great Degeneration.

The purpose of politics and economics and law and civil society is to help the society of humans flourish and live in harmony. They are, in the notion of Jürgen Habermas, the Lebenswelt, the life-world in which humans communicate and develop moral agreement and resolve their differences.

Obviously, when the parties do the opposite, then that spells Trouble, right here is River City. And that, I think, is a shame.