 | DrEntropy (38)
04/20/2006 |  Just about the only person on this list worth reading (except for Krugman and Mencken-who died 50 years ago...) While Ferguson is as pompous and arrogant as any Brit who's seen his income triple and fame quadruple since hopping the Atlantic, he's also very intelligent and insightful, which already puts him above 95% of the people on this list. Like Krugman, he's an academic by trade (Krugman is an economist who understands history; Ferguson is a historian who understands economics), which gives him an edge most journalists don't have. Also like Krugman, he can write readable prose, which most academics can't (nor many journalists, for that matter).
Ferguson's main weakness is that his ideology conflicts with his intelligence. Based largely on his study of the British Empire and the '1st Globalization' of 1815-1914, Ferguson thinks that Globalization and Imperialism can work together, indeed must work together. The events of the last 4 years have proved this thesis wrong, but he has trouble giving it up. So his columns increasingly resemble convoluted attempts to fit inconvenient facts into flawed theories. The facts are that while Globalization and Imperialism did a lot of good, they also did a lot of bad, and neither looks like a winner as far as the next few decades are concerned. Instead of writing Jeremiads about a New Dark Age that can only be averted by a more aggressive American Imperialism and an even more Globalized Economy (neither of which looks very likely), Ferguson should follow Keynes' maxim, which he has quoted himself: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?"
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